Defining Moments Elma Garcia

“I’m so lucky to have these two incredible passions, and I always joke I make money with one, and I spend money with the other,” said Elma Garcia, who competes in dressage with Wenesa in addition to maintaining a full-time career as a director and cinematographer.

Defining Moments

ELMA GARCIA PHOTO

Elma Garcia, a cinematographer, director, photographer, amateur rider and high performance owner, feels most at home behind a camera or on a horse.

By ANN GLAVAN

It’s no surprise that Elma Garcia’s first horse wasn’t a horse at all. It was a cherry tree—and her imagination.

“On the first farm where we grew up, we had this huge, massive old cherry tree, a pie cherry tree, and it had these thick lower trunks,” said Diana Garcia, Elma’s oldest sister. “She would mount this big trunk, and that was her horse. She put a little rope on it. She was maybe 4 or 5 years old.”

Elma’s first imagined rides happened on a modest plot of land in Cowiche, Wash., an unincorporated town almost three hours southeast of Seattle. There were no horses, but an abundance of other animals kept Elma company. Her father, Merced Garcia, raised chickens, pigs and about 50 head of cattle to supplement his income as an apple orchardist. Elma’s mother, Christina, packed apples in the plant.

Even with her penchant for the abstract, it would have been hard for young Elma, sitting in the branches of her tree in a very small town, to imagine just where her enterprising mind and love for horses would take her.

Elma Garcia photographed event rider Kim Severson and her famous mount Winsome Adante for her USET poster series. “At first she got on the horse bareback, and he started to rear up, and she came off. It was so scary!” Garcia said. “And she was on her way to the [FEI] World Equestrian Games, so I said, ‘OK, we won’t do that anymore.’ But I love that picture of Kim.”

After a childhood spent in the saddle, Elma walked away from her equestrian life to pursue a different passion: photography and film. Her eye for composing thoughtful and powerful images and films has taken her all over the world—from New York City to the Alaskan wilderness, and from the Italian coastline to Mexico.

She started as a young woman moving to the big city to make a name and a career for herself, and then she became a well-established businesswoman and owner of a film company—able to pursue her own equestrian goals as well as support the aspirations of some of the greatest talents in U.S. dressage.

And it all started with a cherry tree.

A WESTERN WILD CHILD

Cowiche is not dressage country, and dressage was not Elma’s first discipline. The youngest of five children, Elma’s first real horseback rides were aboard equines used for working cattle.

“My babysitters, they were cattle ranchers, and so when I was a little girl they would take me and throw me on the front of the saddle and pack me around,” Elma said.

When Elma was 9, her parents decided it was time to get their horsecrazy girl a ride of her own. Her father went to an auction and traded one of his cows for a chestnut horse named Savage.

“My dad brought him home in a pickup truck with plywood sides,” Elma said.

Even though he had a fierce name, Savage was a softie at heart. Elma said she had trouble coaxing the horse to canter. But when she got more serious about her riding, her father traded another cow and a bit of money for Naches, a Quarter Horse for Elma to compete in gymkhana events.

“She was just a firecracker, and I

think she taught me more life lessons than anybody ever,” Elma said. “She was little; I’m little. She’s really fast. She was a Quarter Horse, and she was only good in the arena; otherwise she just jigged. She had a lot of heart, and she taught me a lot of great life lessons about never giving up and not worrying about who you’re competing against.”

As a teen, Elma competed Naches in just about every race the local gymkhana offered—including barrel racing, pole bending, the keyhole race and the four-man relay, for which Elma was always the lead rider.

“They used to call us the cheaters because we were always midair when they blew the whistle,” she said.

Elma kept her horse at her family’s farm. After working as an orchardist for many years, her father eventually bought additional acreage from his employer to start his own orchard.

“All of us worked in the orchards pretty much whenever we weren’t in school,” Diana said. “We picked apples, we helped irrigate, we all learned how to pack apples, we all picked cherries when it was cherry season. We did all the orchard work as kids, and I think Elma probably did the least because she was the youngest!”

Elma’s eldest sibling, her brother René, took over the family business after their father passed away. Today he runs an 800-acre fruit farm, G&G Orchards. The sisters’ interests, on the other hand, strayed from the family apple business.

“I was the yearbook editor in high school, and it was a very small high school, so as editor I introduced my sisters to our yearbook adviser,” Diana said. “Elma was more of a photographer.”

After high school, three of the four Garcia girls ended up working for the local newspaper in Yakima, Wash., the Yakima Herald.

ELMA GARCIA PHOTO Elma Garcia does much of her training and riding on her own, meeting up with trainer Button Baker at horse shows. Her dogs Luke and Baby are her eyes on the ground most days.

Owning a team horse is a bucket list item for Elma Garcia, and as a member of the Salvino Syndicate (from left: Bruce and Jen Hlavacek, rider Adrienne Lyle and Salvino, Betsy Juliano, Akiko Yamazaki, Garcia and Jim Cannavino), she may have a chance to cross it off.

“I thought I was going to be a photojournalist, but what ended up happening is I had really great mentors at the paper, so I got to go shoot pictures as well as print the photographs that they were doing,” Elma said. “I got to do my own picture stories, and if they were good enough they would run them.”

Elma found she had an eye for framing unassuming subjects in unique ways.

“Because I grew up in a very small town, I would always go photograph the people who never made the paper,” Elma said. “I would go out and do feature stories on [people] like my farrier.”

After working for the paper, Elma sold Naches and enrolled at the Brooks Institute in Ventura, Calif., to study still photography. Her interests evolved from straight news to commercial photography.

“We all went down there for her graduation, and then soon afterwards my mom called me, and she said, ‘Elma called, and she’s not coming back. She’s going to pack up her car and move to New York,’ ” Diana recalled with a laugh. “And that’s what she did. She packed up her little Honda Civic and drove there.

“It was pretty crazy, but she’s pretty driven,” Diana continued. “And I think she knew if you want to really get into that industry, you go to where the work is, and that’s New York. You learn to do the grunt work and carry the equipment until it’s time for you to have your lucky break.”

When she’s not riding or shooting a commercial, you’re likely to find Elma Garcia and her husband Jim Cannavino on a golf course. ART IN MOTION

Elma started her career in New York, working as a photo assistant for a top advertising photographer for about three years. Then she moved to San Francisco and started her own commercial photography studio, staying true to the same instincts she followed when shooting for the Yakima newspaper.

“I’m a real champion of the underdog. Everybody I photographed, they were real people, they weren’t actors or models. They were normal people,” Elma said.

Elma loved her work behind the camera, and she still does.

“It’s a moment in time that lasts forever, that’s what I love about photography,” Elma said.

But she would soon discover art beyond still photography.

“I think really what happened was in photography, especially the way I did it, I did a lot of very beautiful portraiture with very interesting people, and it was like sculpture,” Elma said. “I liked doing stuff in the studio, and I liked doing stuff in the environment.

“Then in 1991 I got a print job that the advertising agency said, ‘You know what, we want you to do a commercial,’ ” Elma continued. “I had never done a commercial, but I said, ‘OK, I would love to do a commercial,’ and that was it. I did one, and I said, ‘Oh my God, I love this. I love having huge crews. I love production. I love the whole bit. So I quickly pulled my photography studio down and joined a production company in Los Angeles.”

If that sounds like a jarring, huge life change, it was—and that’s just Elma.

“Elma thinks big. She plans big.

She’s very ambitious and is a real gogetter,” said U.S. Olympic dressage rider Adrienne Lyle. “Anything she takes on, she tackles to the fullest.”

In Elma’s mind, film was the medium she’d always been looking for to express herself.

“When I got my first set of dailies back from the film—and this was back before digital, this was real film—I remember looking at that footage, and I just felt like my spirit had been freed,” Elma said. “Because all of a sudden, there was movement, and there was this breath to it. It was so different from a still photograph. And I loved it. It felt more like me.”

Elma took her time learning the new business. She starting working for MJZ, short for Morton Jankel Zander, a production company based out of Los Angeles, New York and London.

“For six years I worked as a director, and I was so fortunate that I worked with all these incredible Academy Awardwinning directors, Bob Richardson, Conrad Hall, Haskell Wexler, everybody, they were like my film school,” Elma said. “I’ve always been one who says surround yourself with the very best and go the path, go straight to the path, so I was really lucky. It was like going to USC film school.”

Eventually, Elma started her own production company, Elma Garcia Films. Under that name, she’s directed and shot film for companies like Nike, Visa, Jack Daniels, Levi’s Jeans and the Make A Wish Foundation. Elma continues to draw on her love of extraordinary stories about ordinary people to craft her commercials.

For example, in a commercial for Jack Daniels, Elma shot from a remote corner of the Alaskan wilderness. Slow panning shots show a small plane cutting through the air above a stark and beautiful land. Skimming over the soft snow banks, the landscape drops off beneath the plane, as it flies over a cliff. The plane seems to slow as it’s no longer whizzing a few feet over untouched snow but flying hundreds of feet over jagged icy rocks.

The shot is powerful, punctuated by the soundtrack of a lone fiddler and a crackling fire at the end. But producing the film? It wasn’t quite so picturesque a process.

“Getting that shot, we’re in a helicopter, right? We’re in a helicopter, and we really can’t hover at 10,000 feet,” Elma said. “I remember the helicopter pilot goes, ‘You know, this is kind of iffy. I don’t know if we’re going to be able to get this shot. I might just have to go drop you off because we can’t have any more weight in the helicopter,’ and

Elma Garcia is no ring rat; she enjoys riding Wenesa on trails around her farm in Sun Valley, Idaho.

I’m going, ‘Oh my God, please don’t drop me off. I’m sucking all the air out of myself. Whatever you do, please don’t drop me out here in the middle of nowhere up in Alaska.’

“But that was just a fantastic commercial,” Elma concluded, demonstrating her determination to capture the story.

“I love casting, and I love casting real people. I love creating stories around people,” Elma said. “Like the Alaskan bush pilot, I was reading Outside magazine, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, let’s build a story around him.’ ”

Listening to Elma talk about her work, you can’t help but get excited about it. She’s dedicated to pouring her entire self into her pursuits—which is why she waited so long to get back into her childhood passion for equestrian sport. Once her career was established, she could support flinging herself back into the horse world wholeheartedly.

Elma Garcia’s husband of nine years, Jim Cannavino, snapped this shot of her on one of their travels together in Washington, D.C.

JIM CANNAVINO PHOTO

RECONNECTING WITH FOUR-LEGGED FRIENDS

After Elma established herself as a successful businesswoman, she was finally in a position to afford the hobby she left in Washington as a teen.

“I got back into it in my 40s,” Elma said. “I had a beautiful old farmhouse. It was in this beautiful park-like setting, so I was surrounded by horses. That got me back into horses.

“I bought a horse from my neighbor, and it was a Thoroughbred, and she bucked like crazy,” Elma continued, laughing. “I said, ‘Oh, I don’t care; I can ride this horse,’ and what I really found out was her back was pretty messed up. I had to rehab her, so when I started to rehab her I started to use more dressage techniques, and that’s how I got exposed to dressage.”

She started riding the Thoroughbred mare, Mishka, in lessons with a dressage instructor next door. But Elma’s true introduction to the world of upper-level dressage started when she bought her next horse.

“I went to Brazil with a friend of mine and got to go to this incredible house,” said Elma. “He was a French developer in Brazil, and he has this incredible farm, a French chateau in Brazil. You go up the stairs, and one way you go into the house, and the other way you went to his office. In his office, there was a grand piano and art and sculpture, a library of books. And then you go over to the rail and look down, and there’s the riding arena.

LISA SLADE PHOTO

Aboard Wenesa, Elma has competed through Intermediaire I, winning the 2016 California Dressage Society Championships adult amateur Intermediaire I and qualifying for the U.S. Dressage Finals in Kentucky.

“That was my introduction to dres- Championships in Burbank. Her persage, and I was like, ‘OK, I get it. I like formances in the regional championthis,’ ” Elma added. “He had a French ship classes were enough to stamp her team rider there, and I ended up going ticket to the U.S. Dressage Finals in home with a beautiful horse.” Kentucky last November.

That horse was Fidelio, or “Fifi,” and Thomas died in August 2016 at the through him Elma met U.S. dressage age of 95, and Elma dedicated her winlegend Debbie McDonald. In a fund- ning CDS ride to Wenesa’s old owner raiser before the 2004 Athens Olympic and her dear friend. Games, the U.S. Equestrian Federation “If Parry was still alive today, I think he sold a month’s worth of lessons with would be incredibly happy and impressed McDonald at Parry Thomas’ River with how far those two have come Grove Farm in Hailey, together,” McDonald said. Idaho. Elma now keeps her

“She basically bought horses at her own farms me in an auction,” in Sun Valley, Idaho, McDonald said with a and Thermal, Calif. laugh. “And to be very No trainer runs either honest, she came with property though. Elma a horse that was not the mostly rides on her own, best suited for her, but you taking regular lessons could sense even then that and meeting trainer Butshe had a great feel for a ton Baker at shows. horse. She had great tim- “For really a true ing and was brave. There amateur, someone who definitely was no intimi- doesn’t have eyes on the dation there, and it was ground all the time, she just one of those situations does an amazing job,” where she moved along McDonald said. “She quite well and quickly.” rides with good feel and

Elma would agree timing, and it’s fun for us with McDonald’s astute to see a horse that we sold analysis of Fifi’s dressage go on and do as well as proclivity. she’s been doing in the amateur world.”

“How many times do dressage people Elma isn’t just interested in competget started and buy the wrong horse right ing older seasoned horses, though—she off the bat? That’s just par for the course,” recently purchased a 5-year-old she’s Elma joked. “But he was my first dres- bringing along under Baker’s tutelage, sage horse that I had imported, and I and she plans to train the 14-year-old took him to Debbie’s, and Debbie pretty Wenesa (Westernhagen—Dancing Girl, much said, ‘OK, you need to get yourself Davignon) up to the Grand Prix level. a real dressage horse.’ ” “Button is a really great coach. She’s very

Enter Intermezzo, or “Uma,” a dark much about trying to teach me to train my bay Danish Warmblood mare (Inouc— own horse, which is what I love about [her],” Oxenholm Pardieu). Elma imported her Elma said. “I love not having someone confrom Denmark with McDonald’s help stantly talking in my ear every day.”

and showed her at the FEI levels. “I still have her. She’s 23 now, and I still ride her. She’s the granddam of the barn—a little firecracker—and I love that mare,” Elma said. “She taught me so much; she’s just been so fabulous.” On the hunt for her next big horse, Elma didn’t have to look far. There was one in McDonald’s barn who caught her eye. It was Wenesa, a Hanoverian mare Thomas had purchased from the Verden auction in Germany. Elma Garcia doesn’t just direct her own films, she also gets behind the camera. Here she shoots on location at Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park near the Arizona-Utah border. “She just fell in love with the mare,” McDonald said. “Parry didn’t sell too many, and he only sold them to people he knew would take good care of them, but he liked Elma. And he decided he couldn’t deny her anymore after she heckled him a few times.” Aboard Wenesa, Elma has competed through Intermediaire I, winning the 2016 California Dressage Society Championships adult amateur Intermediaire I on a 68.02 percent during the GAIG/USDF Region 7

PHOTO COURTESY OF ELMA GARCIA

AN INSTANT MATCH

As Elma’s connections to the upper levels of the dressage sport world grew, she wanted to give back. In 2007, before the Rolex FEI World Cup Dressage Final was hosted in Las Vegas, Elma offered to take portraits

of some top U.S. riders in all different disciplines for the U.S Equestrian Team to use for marketing.

While traveling to Florida to take some of the photos, Elma met Jim Cannavino, her husband of the past nine years.

“We were both on a plane from Dallas to West Palm Beach [Fla.], and I was about to sit down, and this man says to me, ‘Do you mind sitting in 3, so my wife can sit with me?’ ” said Elma. “And I’m like, ‘Yeah, no worries,’ and Jim heard me say that, and he got up and put my bag up on top, and he had the flight attendant bring me some water. And he put his hand

out and said, ‘Hi, I’m Jim,’ and in two and a half hours we found each other.

“I thought, seriously?” Elma continued, laughing at her own romantic comedy moment, but she discovered a real connection with Cannavino—he was an equestrian too, a foxhunter, and he was also a successful businessperson, working as an executive for IBM.

“We remember the day she came back bubbling, going, ‘I met someone on the plane!’ ” said Baker. “It was so cute. And from that day on, she’s been madly in love with Jim. I think they suit each other to a T. They’re great together.”

“That [flight] was Feb. 9, and we got

married Oct. 15 in the main rotunda of the Pantheon in Rome,” Elma said. “On that airplane trip, we were both talking about places we like to travel—we both loved to travel—and I said, ‘Oh, I love Rome. Rome is my favorite city,’ and he said, ‘Oh, I love Rome too.’ I love architecture, and he said, ‘I love architecture,’ and I said, ‘I love the Pantheon,’ and he

“I love casting, and I love casting real people. I love creating stories around people,” said director and cinematographer Elma Garcia.

goes, ‘I love the Pantheon,’ and that’s why we got married there.”

Now Elma and Cannavino are planning to sell their farms out west and move to Tryon, N.C., to be closer to clients in New York and major competition centers.

It was through her connections

with McDonald, Thomas and Baker that Elma met McDonald’s protégé Lyle. Lyle competed at the 2012 London Olympic Games and the 2014 Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games (France) aboard the Thomas-owned horse Wizard, who retired from competition in 2015. Lyle was on the lookout for her next top horse, and that’s where high performance dressage owner and amateur competitor Akiko Yamazaki stepped in.

Yamazaki, a longtime owner and supporter of U.S. Olympic dressage rider Steffen Peters, is also one of the founding members of the U.S. Dressage Owner’s Task Force. To promote the idea of syndicate-owned horses in dressage, she decided to lead by example.

She put up the initial money for purchasing a horse for Lyle and then sold shares of him.

“I got a call one day that Akiko had been working on this idea. I had no idea they had been working on it,” Lyle said.

After a long search for the right horse, Lyle settled on the Hanoverian stallion Salvino (Sandro Hit— Dynastie, Donnerhall), and Yamazaki brought Betsy Juliano, Jen and Bruce Hlavacek, and Elma and Cannavino on board as syndicate owners.

“When we thought about, ‘OK, who would we want to be partners with? Who is like-minded and would get along?’ we immediately thought of Elma,” Yamazaki said. “Especially given how close she was with Adrienne and Debbie.” Lyle and “Vinny” made their debut performance together at a national show in Wellington, Fla., in December of 2016, scoring a 72.76 percent at Intermediaire II and earning a 76.71 percent in an FEI test of choice. “It’s just fun to see how the two of them are really coming together, and Vinny is really becoming her horse,” Elma said. “That’s a bucket list concept for me. It was Christmas a couple years ago, and we were all going around the table talking about bucket list ideas, and I said on my bucket list was to have a team horse. PHOTO COURTESY OF ELMA GARCIA “So I’m hoping, you never know, but that’s the goal with Vinny,” Elma continued. “That would be a dream come true if he could make a team.” But team or no team, Elma is happy to be part of the syndicate because it’s a part of her passion—the same passion she applies to her own riding goals and career.

“You know, I think the first words that come to mind when I see Elma [are] always joy and positivity,” Yamazaki said. “I think she approaches everything with a lot of joy, and as a result you just feel so good working with her.”

“I’m so lucky to have these two incredible passions, and I always joke I make money with one, and I spend money with the other,” Elma said with a laugh. “I have a lot of joy in my heart, over both of my passions.”

Elma Garcia and Jim Cannavino met on a flight to Florida, and after discovering they shared a love of horses and architecture, they chose the main rotunda of the Pantheon in Rome as their wedding location.