Documentary &
Fine Art Landscapes
About the Photographer
James Sobredo is a documentary photographer and photojournalist who specializes in photographing Filipino global migration. He has a long-term photo-documentary and oral history research project on Filipinos in Hong Kong (China) and Barcelona (Spain). He has photographed the Filipino American community in the United States for the last 30 years. He is also a fine art photographer who specializes in landscape photography. His photographs of Spain, Portugal and the Philippines have been featured in art gallery exhibits in San Francisco and Stockton. His photo-documentary projects have resulted in solo exhibitions in museums and galleries in San Francisco, Sacramento, Stockton and group exhibitions in Oakland and Stockton. In 2020, he had a solo photography exhibit in the Philippines, in Makato, Aklan, where he has a long-term documentary project of Filipino farmers and fishermen and where his photographs are on permanent display at the Municipal Hall.
His photographs, articles and graphics work have been published in The New York Times, AsianWeek, Filipinas Magazine, Positively Filipino, maganda magazine (Berkeley), and other newspapers and books.
Dr. Sobredo is also Professor Emeritus in the Ethnic Studies Department, Asian American Studies Program, at California State University in Sacramento, where he also served as Department Chair. He has a Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.A. in Ancient Greek Philosophy from Bowling Green State University where he worked with Dr. Fred Miller, and a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Washington where he was mentored by Dr. David Keyt and Dr. Kenneth Clatterbaugh. His area of specialty is Filipino and Chinese global migration and Filipino American immigration history. Since his retirement from university, he concentrates his work on documentary photography, photojournalism and fine art landscapes.
If he had to do it all over again, he would have gotten a Ph.D. in economics and followed along the path of the Brazilian social documentary photographer Sebastião Salgado, an economist with the World Bank who left his job and then spent his life photographing and working with disenfranchised, poor people around the world. A Filipino by birth, he speaks Ilonggo, Aklanon and Tagalog, as well as Chamorro and Spanish. He splits his time living in Stockton (the original Filipino American community in the United States) and Sausalito where he lives on his sailboat. He and his wife Lou also spend their summers and winter breaks in Spain (Basque country). He is a practitioner of Vipassana Buddhism.
Sobredo is an avid long-distance hiker, and in 2013 he traveled around the world with a backpack and hiked in the Philippines, Cambodia and the Camino de Santiago in Spain and Portugal. He has hiked sections of the Pacific Crest Trail. He shoots using both Canon full-frame bodies (50 MP DSLR & 26 MP mirrorless) and Sony 42-MP full-frame & 24-MP APSC mirrorless bodies. Since his retirement, he is enjoying riding his BMW GS motorcycle on long-distance journeys. In 2019, he rode from the Mexican border to Canada, along the Pacific Coast via Highway 1/101, and, again in 2020, but this time only SF to the Canadian border. But, due to the coronavirus, he decided that it is best to curtail his motorcycle travel plans and wait for better times and try again in 2021.
*All photographs on this webpage are ©James Sobredo: All rights reserved.
Contact information: drsobredo"at"gmail.com
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