Justina Villanueva first developed her love of heavy metal music when her family moved from Hoboken to the Manhattan Trailer Park on Tonnelle Avenue in North Bergen. She said her “metal” friends in her community helped shaped her musical tastes.
“I grew up there, and seriously, it was the safest place in town,” Villanueva said last week.
A North Bergen High School graduate, Villanueva, 22, will go on her first major U.S. tour with the Norwegian band Mayhem for the next month as a photographer shooting for a metal-focused website.
After high school, Villanueva went on to attend LIM College (a fashion business college) before transferring to Montclair State University, where she received a degree in broadcasting.
She had an internship at Spin Magazine working in advertising, but she decided the 9-to-5 life wasn’t for her. An internship at the Atlantic City Press was a great learning experience, she said, but Villanueva missed the urban grit of the tri-state area.
She really didn’t see herself as a photographer until her junior year in college, and even then it was a bit of a surprise.
In one of her classes, she had to compose a video segment. She choose to do it on local metal bands.
“I actually choose to do it on prisons, but I couldn’t get the access,” said Villanueva.
One of the bands she met in the process, Psyopus, eventually asked her to go on tour with them. The band asked her to meet them in Rochester, N.Y., but the tour didn’t go as planned when the lead singer left the band.
“I ended up having to go on tour with them again to do more promotional pictures because they had a new lead singer,” said Villanueva. “And so I did a full U.S. tour, and then in January they went to Russia and they invited me to go.”
Life on tour
Villanueva said that every U.S. city she visited was memorable and that traveling in a van was an experience because you have to “deal with people you really don’t want to.”
“We’re going to be in big busses.” – Justina Villanueva
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“Everything you see in James Bond movies, it’s true,” said Villanueva. “The women walk in stilettos this high in the snow. Officers come after you. They don’t like tourism at all. On the subway, the police officers told us to put away our cameras just for having them out.”
Psyopus’ label paid for Villanueva’s shots, but this time, when she tours with the Nowegian band Mayhem and five other bands, the website www.metalinjection.com will pay for her living expenses on the road.
“We’re going to be in big busses,” said Villanueva.
Constant motion
Villanueva also shoots for the website www.BrooklynVegan.com and for Lit Lounge, a concert venue in Manhattan. There is also a chance she will shoot for other concerts this summer, she said. But she said she likes to stick to off-kilter bands in the tri-state area.
“I went to college because I wanted a secure job,” she said, “and as soon as I graduated … I decided [9-to-5] was not what I wanted to do ever again. I just want to be out.”
She said that she supplements her income through some broadcasting work and has worked for MTV in their reality television casting department.
Villanueva said she doesn’t plan to stop her photography anytime soon.
From N.B. trailer park
Villanueva now lives in East Rutherford, but she stays in contact with people in her old neighborhood. The trailer park residents have been evicted due to upcoming development, and must leave this summer.
Villanueva said she knows of one friend whose family is moving, but wonders what the other residents will do.
“It’s weird because when we lived in Hoboken, right across the street from St. Mary Hospital, five years after we moved out of there they knocked [the building] down and built a parking lot,” said Villanueva. “So everywhere we lived before, it just like there’s no trace of it.”
Tricia Tirella may be reached at TriciaT@hudsonreporter.com.