Monika Wnuk

Visual Journalist

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Behind the scenes shot from my lighting class at the Chicago Photography Center. Achieving the hair light.

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Monika Wnuk is a multimedia journalist and documentary photographer from Chicago, Illinois.

She graduated with a Master’s from the Medill School of Journalism in June. She recently began documenting family life in the Yucatan Peninsula, a region undergoing drastic change in the midst of rapid development.

The photos she loves the most continue to be the ones she’s made of her family and friends. Frequently featured is her Uncle Mark, who takes her on shooting dates to the Macy’s appliance section to capture the American dream.

Monika shoots for When We Blink, a team of female photographers based in California, Illinois, and New York.

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Javier Hernandez faces two rows of 18 girls between the ages of two and fifteen. “Ready?” he asks, then nods to the woman in charge of music. Laura Branigan’s 1982 hit “Gloria” fills the air. After a “cinco, seis, siete, ocho” from Javier, the girls leap into their routine.

It happens that way every Tuesday night. Girls from all four corners of Pueblo Maya gather in front of Javier’s house to practice for a big competition held in Cozumel in February. Javier choreographs the routine, designs and sews costumes for the girls, and does their makeup. “Be brave, be fearless,” he tells them before the music starts again. 

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Rosa Hernandez stands beside her husband while he makes conchas, a sweet, fluffy Mexican bread that comes in different flavors. “We’ve been here for four years, she says. “ It’s gone by,“ she snaps her fingers, “like that.”

Rosa’s family – her husband, two sons, two daughters and their dog, Nacho – moved here from the much larger Playa del Carmen after her husband, apanadero, or bread maker, found it hard to compete there. In Pueblo Maya he’s one of two bread makers, serving the people who moved to the neighborhood to work in the resorts that line the coast of the Riviera Maya.

Rosa, who sells the bread and pastries her husband makes from a cart in front of their home, says that although business is better in Pueblo Maya, it’s not steady. “There are good seasons and bad seasons,” she says. “When the tourists don’t come, those are the bad seasons.”

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Every morning, Carolina Manzanilla takes a ferry from the town of Puerto Aventuras to the popular tourist island of Cozumel. She travels those 20 miles to her job at a bustling hotel.

When she was hired five years ago, she started in laundry. One day, her friend let it slip to management that Carolina had a deep passion for cooking. She was given a trial period in the kitchen, after which her bosses gave their verdict. “They said, this is your kitchen, you tell us what you need,” she says.

Here, she is pictured at a friend’s house in Pueblo Maya with two of her three granddaughters. “Everything I do, it’s for them,” she says.

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The Women and Girls of Pueblo Maya

Thick, prickly jungle lines both sides of the 80-mile stretch of highway that extends south of Cancun through the world-famous Riviera Maya. The resorts that give the peninsula its fame line the coast to the left of the highway. 

To the right, farther inland, are the new towns built for hotel employees, young men and women who come from all over Mexico seeking a steady job and a new life for their families. 

It’s been estimated that resorts along the Riviera Maya hire 10 people per every hotel room built. With the influx of people to the area, the demand for housing is hardly met. The houses that have gone up in new developments are uniform, each row similar to the next. It’s the people who move in that give them individual flair.

In this photo, Daisy Lopez from the Pueblo Maya neighborhood of Puerto Aventuras, holds her 2-year-old daughter, Kimberly, in front of their home. Daisy moved to Pueblo Maya from Chiapas two years ago with her husband, who sought work as a hotelero, or hotel employee. While her husband is away at work, Daisy takes care of their two daughters, Kimberly and Ana Lisette. 

When asked what attracted her to Pueblo Maya, she answers, “We wanted a house of our own. Here, we can have that.”

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The Year of 14: A Day in the Life of Miss Illinois

When Marisa Buchheit picked her contestant number at the Miss Chicago competition last year, she drew 13. The judges deliberated on the superstition and gave her 14 instead.

“I was kind of a fluke,” she says jokingly. But winning Miss Chicago as contestant number 14 wasn’t much of a coincidence. That one number seems to follow her everywhere she goes. 

It’s the date of her dad’s birthday, May 14, and the date of her own birthday, January 14. With a January birthday, she was able to beat the age limit for pageant contestants by exactly 14 days.

Looking to the prevalence of that number in Marisa’s journey, it can seem as if fate brought her this far, but spending a day with her proves that it took a lot more than just that.

A devout vegan and classical opera singer, Marisa often talks about a time in her life when she didn’t see pageants in her future. Struggling to find herself in her early teens, she often turned to unhealthy food options and copied trends she saw her friends adopting. 

It wasn’t until she became a vegan and began auditioning for musicals in high school that Marisa began growing more comfortable with herself. She applied to the Cleveland Institute of Music out of high school and moved to Ohio, where she entered her first pageant.

“It took a long time to feel confident in my own skin, but music and my support system helped get me here.”

And it’s her support system that she relies on every day. Spending time with her this July as she prepared for Miss America proved that. Her mom and dad helped with logistics and events, and her brother and boyfriend performed alongside her at fundraising efforts for one of her longtime causes—the Children’s Miracle Network.

With a strong network of dedicated people behind her dreams, Marisa was able to reach even higher for them, achieving personal goals and becoming more confident with every step. When she was crowned Miss Illinois on June 14, it didn’t come as a surprise. 

“It’s about being confident in who you are, realizing that each girl brings something to the position,” she says.

That confidence has taken Marisa straight to the stage at the Miss America competition, which is being held, without coincidence, on September 14, 2014.

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Uncle Marek is a 25-year-old trapped in a let’s-not-talk-about-age-year-old’s body, which is why he prefers that I scrap the uncle and just call him Marek. The photos he made in Poland in the 70s filled galleries.

He stopped making them a decade ago when he moved to Chicago to support his family, but he’ll tell you that he hasn’t given up his zycie artystyczne, or artistic lifestyle.  You better have a really good reason if you aren't going to a gallery show with him next weekend.

I love having him around to talk me through making photos that tell stories. In this one, we were doing just that while ringing in the New Year at Alice's Lounge.

I’m Monika Wnuk and making photos takes me out of my comfort zone in a way that I can’t believe I ever lived without.