William Camargo was born and raised in Anaheim — a city whose history his public education did not teach him. His practice is built from that gap. Using photography, installation, public interventions, and archives, he addresses issues of gentrification and Chicanx/Latinx histories, deploying counter-narratives that amplify, expose, and dismantle hegemonic structures within local city histories.

His series Origins and Displacements places him in the landscape holding hand-written signs that surface oft-ignored historical truisms about the locations on which he stands — research drawn from Anaheim's racist past, repackaged in the present as police violence, capitalist exploitation, and erasure. In All the Stuff I Can Carry, he turns to the self-portrait tradition of white male conceptual photographers like Duane Michals and John Divola, recontextualizing their banal gestures with objects that reflect his Chicanx/Latinx identity. A person of color running away from a camera carries an entirely different weight.

His practice is both hyperlocal and historical — grounded in the specific streets, archives, and communities of Orange County, while speaking to the broader condition of Brown people navigating a country that has worked to make them invisible. The archive is not neutral. The photograph is not passive. Both are sites of contestation, and Camargo uses them accordingly.