Photography junior Lily Robles painted a mural on her bedroom wall from the photo of a naked John Lennon wrapped around a clothed Yoko Ono. But she gave Ono tusks and a tail. “She’s the walrus,” Robles said.
Her bedroom is spilling over with drawings, photos, paintings and art supplies, and she plans on making the adjacent room in her home into a darkroom as soon as she installs the ventilation system. She’s also Albuquerque’s up-and-coming wedding photographer.
Daily Lobo: (Looking into a closet) These dresses are pretty cool. Are these costumes for photo shoots?
Lily Robles: Yeah, I’ve done some with photo shoots, like this awesome rainbow dress. I really want to do an underwater one. … I wanted to get the girls in prom dresses and just do ruined prom night under water. So I kept all my dresses from high school, just in case.
(Daily Lobo photographer starts changing her lenses.)
LR: I know, right? Changing the lenses? I had a wedding and it was utter chaos doing it by myself. It was the last one I did. One of the batteries died and then the other one the card was full, and it was the you-may-now-kiss-the-bride part and I was like, “Oh crap!”
DL: You mean you missed the bride kissing?
LR: No, I didn’t. I switched it out just in time. They were saying the final prayer before the kiss and the wedding party was like, “Are you ok?” and I was like, “No, I’m freaking out!” And I’m over here scattered with all my stuff in the middle of the aisle. I caught it just in time.
DL: So you do stuff for your friends or people commission you?
LR: People actually commission me. This last one was for my friend, but she had referred me to a lot of different people, so I’ve already done seven, which is super exciting ‘cause I’m only 21.
DL: Yeah, it’s good to be accomplished when you’re young because then everyone thinks that you’re some sort of messiah of doing.
LR: It’s been a lot of fun. I’ve met some really crazy clients.
DL: So were any of these seven weddings particularly weird, like the bride wore a bee costume or something?
LR: No, I think the only weird one was the backyard one that I did. It was all in Spanish, and I was like, “I don’t understand anything!” I got two words out of that. Amor. That means love. I hope to do a weird wedding some day. That would be fun.
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DL: OK. So how long have you been painting for?
LR: In college I was like, “I really want to take a painting class.” I had never used oils and so now I’m like I can never go back to acrylic. Once you use oils, you can’t go back because you can actually blend with them.
DL: So do you have any exhibitions coming up?
LR: I’m still kind of working on projects, but I figured by next spring I’m going to need to do an exhibition ’cause this is just stocking up everywhere. It’s just ridiculous. It’s piling up everywhere.
DL: So what’s your dream art job; what do you want to do with all this when you get out of college?
LR: I plan on opening up my own studio, basically like a wedding business. I’m going to go to culinary school as soon as I finish my degree in photography, and so I want to have a wedding business where I can do the catering, the cake, the pictures and just be like one-stop-bam-awesome place. I want to minor in business as well. One of my friends is a wedding planner, so I was like, “Dude, we’re gonna open our own business, and it’s going to be awesome” because everyone’s always getting married, and it’ll be pretty solid for a really long time. I think it would be a lot of fun.
DL: I hear that if you’re photographing a wedding, you’re supposed to remember to take a picture of the bride’s shoes because she always puts lots of thought into the shoes that she wears, but people don’t always think of that. So, if you take a picture of her shoes, the bride will be happy.
LR: Interesting. I’ve always taken pictures of shoes, but I’ve never known that. I’ve taken some of just the bride and groom’s feet together because there was one couple where she wore Converse instead of heels. It was just this one picture where she’s lifting her dress and I’m like, “That’s so cute!” I’d probably wear Converse to my wedding.
DL: Do you have a favorite photographer?
LR: Sally Mann.
DL: She’s awesome. She drags around that old-school glass —
LR: Yeah, that’s what I love about her! She stays old school even with all this crazy digital stuff. She’s just like, “Mmm, No. 8×10. I’m going to drag this around everywhere I go.”
