The ninth annual Alternative Photography International Symposium is the premiere event for those into alternative processing methods. Here is where one can discover how to make images with historic processes like salt prints and Woodbury types, or learn how to make photographs with cottage cheese.

Cristina Kahlo, great-granddaughter of Guillermo Kahlo and great-niece of Frida Kahlo, is a practicing photographer and member of Maestro Julio Galindo’s Platinum Print Workshop in Mexico City. She visited Santa Fe this October to attend the Alternative Photographic International Symposium sponsored by Bostick and Sullivan, Inc. and chatted with The Jackalope Magazine about her relationship to photography. Kahlo’s photographs will be on exhibit at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design’s Marion Center  Gallery with four other photographers until Nov. 8. The following interview has been edited for brevity. Jackalope Magazine: When did you discover photography? Cristina Kahlo: My father was an amateur photographer—he was always playing with cameras. The darkroom was a place for adults. Children were not allowed. There was a special lock on the door so that children could not get in. So when I was 10 or 11 years old and my father invited me in, it was like I was being allowed into a forbidden room. He enlarged a picture of a family picnic and showed me how to submerge the photo paper in the chemicals, and that moment of seeing the image appear on the paper was magic. That is when I discovered what it means to make a photograph, and the moment when I fell in love with photography. JM: How did you pursue that newfound love? CK: My father died young. He was 42, and I was 13. But after he died, his darkroom was still in the house. A brother of a friend of mine did photography, and he said, ‘you like photography, don’t you,’ and he showed me the ABCs. That’s how I started printing. Then when I was 16 years old, I started at the Escuela Activa de Photographia, the only school...