Group
New Curated Collator: 27 L.A. Photographers
September 26, 2018
Rebecca Morse, Curator, Wallis Annenberg Photography Department
Over the last five years, LENS: Photography Council has visited 27 artist’s studios all across Los Angeles. From Altadena to Venice, Chinatown to West Adams, in living rooms, office parks, garages, and warehouses, artists have shared with us their work often in the very place where they make it. Some artists we visit have been working for 40 years, and others are just out of school; some were raised in Southern California and others have travelled over 7,000 miles to live here. This city is as vast as it is diverse and the work that is made within it has all of those particulars embedded within its DNA. Not one style prevails among the photographs, videos, and films, but a resolute push towards experimentation and individuality persists among its makers.
A Matter of Memory: Photography as Object in the Digital Age
Foreword by Bruce Barnes. Text by Lisa Hostetler, William T. Green.
The majority of photographic images today are recorded and viewed digitally, rather than on film and paper. Amateurs, photojournalists and commercial photographers alike rarely produce material objects as the final step in their photographic process, making photographs in the form of physical objects increasingly scarce.
But what happens to personal and collective memories when photographic images are not instantly accessible on the face of physical objects? How is society’s relationship to memory changing as digital photographs become the norm?
A number of contemporary artists are making work that suggests the potential consequences of photography’s latest metamorphosis. Two main strategies emerge: some artists dig deep into photographic materials as though searching for the locus of memory, and others incorporate found photographs into their work as virtual talismans of recollection. Both highlight the presence of the photographic object and function as self-conscious meditations on photography’s ongoing reorganization of our mental and physical landscape.