One of the most uncanny things about the photographs in Vera Lutter's exhibition Museum in the Camera, is the fact that many of the galleries depicted, as well as the buildings themselves are no longer there. Lutter shot on site at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Vera Lutter
Suitcase Joe and the State of Homeless Photography Sidewalk Champions
Sidewalk Champions By Suitcase Joe Burn Barrel Press In the wake of the unprecedented court decree issued in April by a federal judge ordering the city of Los Angeles to provide shelter for the 4,600 souls currently living in downtown skid row by this October, the...
SIGHTS UNSCENE The Reader, Los Angeles, circa 1990
Books: Jona Frank and John Divola SoCal Photographers Cover It All
Jona Frank’s new book, Cherry Hill, came out this spring almost simultaneously, but coincidentally, at the same time as another book, Terminus, by another SoCal photographer, John Divola. The coincidence is as fortunate as it is fortuitous because their subjects and...
SIGHTS UNSCENE Untitled, Los Angeles, 2020
Sherrie Levine: Sherrie Levine, Sherrie Levine Exhibition at Xavier Hufkens, Brussels
Part I: Lana Del Rey Some claimed that Lana Del Rey’s 2017 song “Get Free” was a rip-off of Radiohead’s iconic and self-masturbatory indie ballad “Creep,” which led to a rather unhinged and masculinist lawsuit. It seems that for women artists, homage or...
Pick of the Week: Joni Sternbach Von Lintel Gallery
In 1839, the very first portrait photograph was captured of (and by) Robert Cornelius. It must have been a difficult – albeit likely humorous – process, as Cornelius set up his camera before hurriedly running to sit motionless in front of it, arms crossed and hair...
Farrah Karapetian
Farrah Karapetian's current show, "The Photograph is Always Now," is a touching rumination on the loss of her father, who died of cancer last year. Furthering her ongoing exploration of photography's potential for semi-fictionally recasting bygones into the present,...
Christopher Russell
"Photography is dead," Christopher Russell declares in the statement for his current show, arguing that with the ease and popularity of digital manipulation, "there is no longer a belief that the captured image is anything more than a record of personalized fictions."...
Eileen Cowin; “Group Show: Drawings and Other Works on Paper”
Eileen Cowin's solo exhibition at As Is comprises eight photographic works chosen from two series, "Mad Love," and "Kafka's Diary." Each of Cowin's pictures cleverly pairs two disparate photos whose strange vertical abutment evokes emotion and suggests open-ended...
Graciela Iturbide
The black-and-white magic of Graciela Iturbide's photography is difficult to capture in words. Through her lens, quotidian moments acquire an iconic, spiritual quality as life's dichotomies and death's mysteries lyrically play out in light, shadow, pattern, and...
Justice Howard’s Voodoo
Major religions don’t do much image control; with his long hair and white skin, the hippyesque Jesus of the 21st century looks identical to the savior of the 11th century. The Buddha is also presented as the same old, same old; hair or no hair, it’s the smilin’ guy...
Lousy Lighting and Not Well-Hung
Clearly I am both not from LA and do not run in VIP circles because I had never heard of the Soho House prior to my invite to see photographer Kourtney Roy’s new collection of works on display there. I mistakenly assumed it was just a cheeky name for a gallery, so was...
Jane and Louise Wilson
Can the aftermath of a nuclear disaster or any other kind be measured or quantified? Certainly not with a handmade yard-stick. British twins Jane and Louise Wilson ponder these questions in their compelling exhibition “Imperial Measure.” The installation of...
Fred Lonidier
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Or not. Fred Lonidier’s recent show of photographic work provides a telling demonstration of two inextricably interconnected facts. First, that a vast cultural chasm has opened up between the present world and that of the...
Vasco Araújo
Vasco Araújo’s “Under the Influence of Psyche” features works of various media that draw on the traditions of art, literature, opera, dance and music to construct new narratives demonstrating the instability of the canon. Happy Days (2006) records the stage directions...
Augusta Wood
With 21 new photographs in her second solo show at Angles Gallery, Augusta Wood resumes where she left off in her 2010 body of work, “I have only what I remember,” by delving deeply into personal history. Wood constructs her photographs from multiple images selected...
Taryn Simon
Taryn Simon, widely considered today’s premier conceptual photographer, is essentially an investigative taxonomist. She rose to fame with her series “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar” (2007), in which she secured access to normally closed-off sites like...