Project XV: New Perspectives on Photography

Project XV: New Perspectives on Photography by Aline SmithsonJanuary 2, 2020

©Ellen Friedlander, from Betrayal

Each year, I teach a year long Personal Project class at the Los Angeles Center of Photography where photographers continue with or create new bodies of work, produce artist’s books or catalogs, hone their articulation and consider their influences. To say that I’m proud of these artists is an understatement–I’m amazed by their dedication to their craft and their journey as photographic artists. It has been a complete pleasure to spend 2019 with them.

Saturday night, January 4th, from 5:00pm to 8:00pm, this wonderful group of opens the exhibition Project XV: New Perspectives on Photography at LACP’s brand spankin’ new location in Culver City and will share their uniquely personal bodies of work. The exhibition runs until February 2, 2020.

The artists include: Andy House, Beth Dubber, Carissa Dorson, Elisa Haber, Ellen Friedlander, Hilary White, Julia Bennett, Kristina Shires, Krysia Lukkason, Mara Zaslove, Michael Hacker, Michelle Elkins, Sharon Johnson-Tennant, Wayne Swanson and Yulia Tregub Morris.

The exhibition explores the essence of being human: examining issues of family and relationships, aging, creativity, the importance of place, and new perspectives on the California landscape — present and past. The photographers will also display artist books they created and selected images from the group’s Instagram conversation, @XVprojects. The artists will discuss their projects on January 23 from 7:00pm-9:00pm.

©Andy House

As a street photographer, Andy House is interested in photographing the human experience with curiosity and possibility. Exploration of a Moment represents a broadening abstract perspective as a way to examine time, space, and movement. He uses multiple techniques to explore the navigation of space in contemporary life.

Andy House grew up in Los Angeles where his boyhood dream was to see and experience the world. He first studied photography as an undergraduate but his photo pursuits were interrupted by a career in the motion picture business. After establishing himself as a senior executive in television production, Sony Pictures sent him overseas to live in Hong Kong and to supervise TV production across China and Southeast Asia. It was that assignment that put a camera back into his hands in order to document the realization his boyhood dream.

Upon retiring from motion picture production, he decided to devote himself to capturing single moments in time. He formalized his study at Santa Monica College and then the Los Angeles Center of Photography. Since he has mounted a one-man exhibition at El Centro Del Pueblo featuring his documentary photo project on Echo Park. His travel photos have received recognition from National Geographic and other photographs have received attention and awards in multiple group exhibitions. He now splits his time between his photo pursuits and working as an adjunct instructor at the American Film Institute.

©Beth Dubber, Out of the Fog,

©Beth Dubber, Baby Girl Seymour

©Beth Dubber, If Only

In Absentia is a series of vignettes about various themes of the adoptee experience, created by Beth Dubber, an adoptee from the closed adoption system of Ohio.

Beth Dubber is a Los Angeles based unit photographer who divides her time between television and movie sets, both in studio and on location, and working in the worlds of commercial and fine art photography. She also specializes in portraiture.

Born in Cleveland, OH, Beth received her BA in Studio Art and German language at Cleveland State University where she studied with photographer, Masumi Hyashi. While in school, she traveled to Bali where she created environmental portraits of the inhabitants of a small village in the Tabanan Region. Following graduation she moved to New York where she worked as a line producer on a variety of commercials. Eventually, Beth moved to Los Angeles to focus on a career in the entertainment industry, which began as a travel coordinator for the Ellen DeGeneres Show and led to her career as a highly sought after television and motion picture still photographer.

In 2012, Beth founded the group, Camerawomen Los Angeles, an organization created to lend technical and educational support as well as networking opportunities for women who work in the camera departments on film and TV sets. In 2015, 2017, & 2018, Dubber was nominated for the “Excellence in Photography in Television Award.” Additionally, her still photography for the TV show, “Transparent,” was featured in Slate Magazine with an article written by David Rosenberg.

Ms. Dubber also creates work as a fine art photographer and has both exhibited her work in group shows and curated others, across the country. She has exhibited at her alma mater, Cleveland State University, in the exhibition, A Tribute to Masumi Hysahi, honoring Masumi in a commemorative show.

©Carissa Dorson, Bougainvillea

©Carissa Dorson, Face Plant

©Carissa Dorson, Pool Float

Anywhere and Everywhere is an exercise in being present. Carissa Dorson takes Polaroids of herself in moments when she is feeling particularly anxious or sad, and then carries them with her as she looks for simple beauties in her daily life. This juxtaposition shows that no matter how beautiful or mundane the surroundings, these feelings exist anywhere and everywhere.

Carissa Dorson is a Los Angeles-based photographer who uses portraiture to tell vulnerable and relatable stories surrounding fear, anxiety, and self-confidence. Originally from Silver Spring, Maryland, she received a BFA from Florida State University’s College of Motion Picture Arts, and then moved to Los Angeles to work as a cinematographer in 2012. Her cinematography work began in sketch comedy, and gradually expanded to features, short films, commercials, and music videos. At the same time, she continued to develop her still-photography fine art projects. Because of her work and love of comedy, she created a portrait series called Funny People. Serious Photos., which was featured in L.A. Weekly. She has exhibited work at the Duncan Miller Gallery and Los Angeles Center of Photography, and was featured in publications such as Underexposed Magazine, FOTO Magazine, and Don’t Smile. As a cinematographer, her work has appeared at festivals such as Tribeca and Cinequest, and on networks such as Adult Swim and Showtime.

©Elisa Haber

Twinsburg is Elisa Haber’s ongoing series about the twins of Twin’s Days in Twinsburg, Ohio. It is the largest Twins Festival in the world, with an average of 3,000 sets of twins gathering annually in the first weekend in August. Haber has been photographing the event, which has a different theme each year, since 2016.

Elisa Haber, born in NYC, resides in Los Angeles. Elisa been an editorial photographer for the last 30 years. Her work has been published in Flaunt magazine, Detour magazine, Newsweek, Time, Entertainment Weekly, Variety, Director’s Guild Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Diego Tribune, and Venice magazine. Her photo series have included work on public access tv personalities, “A Corporation”; photographs of employees at an undisclosed location, and her most recent work on “Twinsburg”. Twinsburg has been an ongoing photo project beginning in 2016 documenting the largest twins festival in the world. She resides in LA with her daughter.

©Ellen Friedlander

Betrayal: Shattered in a Moment is an ongoing body of work conceived by Ellen Friedlander as she confronted the realization that everything her children and she had experienced was a lie: her husband of 25 years had fathered a child and they were unknowingly replaced. Friedlander uses multiple in-camera settings and cutting and reassembling of original photographs to process layers of toxic emotional trauma to help overcome paralyzed sadness and understand these very complex emotions, hoping that this work stirs a new conversation.

Born in 1959 in Utica, New York, Ellen Friedlander is a fine art and documentary photographer who makes the unseen, visible. She graduated from Ithaca College, NY, with a BFA and received an MA from the University of Florida, in Gainesville, with a degree in Mass Communications and an emphasis in Advertising. After college, Ellen spent fifteen years in Hong Kong and pursued her photography while working as a photographer’s representative.

Ellen has had numerous exhibitions, including solo exhibitions in Sacramento and at the United Jewish Congregation in Hong Kong, group exhibitions at the Los Angeles Center of Photography, Saint Xavier University in Chicago, and various galleries in Los Angeles and Crakow, Poland. Ellen lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

©Hilary White

The Patriarchy and Me by Hilary White is a timely photographic memoir that explores family, fatherhood, childhood and the deep frailties of being human. It’s a visual diary with her father about what was unspeakable — love, money, power, sex and the secrets and lies that bound them together and tore them apart. It combines archival and conceptual images that respond to her father’s “Mad Man” lifestyle and how she internalized patriarchal culture.

Hilary White is a photographer who focuses on personal narrative and fine art photography. Her work explores the co-existence of beauty and imperfection, strength and fragility, and the realm of the unspoken.

Hilary was born and raised in New York City. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and the School of Visual Arts. Her background is in art, film, publishing and digital media with a special interest in socially engaged artwork.

Her series The Patriarchy and Me is a visual dialog with her father combining archival images, memorabilia, and conceptual images that respond to her experiences growing up in a real-life version of ‘Mad Man.’ She envisions ways in which our definitions of masculine and feminine are transforming and traditional patriarchal paradigms are giving way to new social norms.

Her handmade book which accompanies The Patriarchy and Me is entitled I’m Your Man. It is a compilation of the profiles of men who liked her on online dating sites, contextualized with images of male celebrities and cultural icons from the past.

Hilary moved to Los Angeles in 2005 where she currently lives and works. Her images have been featured in exhibitions primarily on the west coast.

©Julia Bennett

The alley is friendly, yet tense. Private, but disturbingly intimate. It is where the relics of your neighbors’ spring cleaning scatter and the high schoolers smoke pot and cars are fixed and cans are collected. In South Holt, Julia Bennett takes comfort in imagining that as neighborhoods in Los Angeles change and evolve, the alley has always been this way; that the scraps of life and forgotten things of its residents have always floated along in the breeze, away from the context of their original ownership.

Julia Bennett is a marine scientist, fine art photographer, and book artist exploring the intersections between science, visual art, and the contemporary social landscape, focusing on how those intersections influence our understanding of a natural world in transition. Julia’s photographs have been featured in solo and group exhibitions throughout the US and abroad, including the Columbia Museum of Art (SC), The Pence Gallery (CA), and the CSIRO Ecosciences Precinct (AUS). Her series Into the Umbra, which explores the microscopic world of plankton, has recieved multiple grants and awards including the Magellan Scholar Grant and the USC PhotoFest Review Prize. Julia’s work has been published both in print and online, most notably through WIRED, Featureshoot, and PetaPixel. Julia is currently living and working in Los Angeles, CA.

©Kris Shires

Believe is a series of photographs by Kris Shires exploring play, story and light through constructed still lifes in collaboration with her daughter.

Kris Shires is an artist who works in a variety of media including photography, film, and oil painting. Born in the Fingerlakes region of Central New York, she graduated from Hamilton College and continued pre-medical studies at UCSD. In 2005, she decided to leave medicine to pursue a career in the arts.

In her photography, Shires explores family life, landscapes, and memory. Her work has been exhibited at the Los Angeles Center of Photography. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband Claude, her young daughter Sennett and a dog named Rugby.

©Krysia Lukkason

In her series My California, Krysia Lukkason explores all 58 counties within California. With the largest population, third largest physical size, second-highest elevation and lowest elevation in the country, California is a varied and diverse landscape that is more than its iconic hotspots. Lukkason offers a peek into the everyday to give a sense of place beyond what California is known for.

Krysia Lukkason is a fine art photographer from Santa Rosa, California. She explores themes regarding the human condition, duality of life, and relationships with our internal and external environments. She obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree in Geography from California State University, Fullerton, which informs her artistic view and approach with the various ways our environments can be perceived and understood.

Krysia’s images have been included in a number of juried shows at PhotoPlace Gallery, SE Center for Photography, and PH21 Gallery. She has also been included in publications with F-Stop Magazine and received awards with New York Center for Photographic Arts and Maine Media Workshops.

Krysia currently lives in Long Beach, California.

©Mara Zaslove

Aging Gracefully is Mara Zaslove’s study of a woman in the last chapter of her life. Unfortunately, many people see getting older as a trial and advancing in years, a disability. Zaslove is hopeful that these photographs will stand as a metaphor to demystify aging and encourage the viewer to continue to embrace the “joy” in everyday living.

Born in Burbank, CA, Mara Zaslove received a BA in Dance and Sociology at U.C. Berkeley and later, received a Teaching Credential at U.C.L.A. After teaching Elementary School, she completed her M.A. in Counseling and Guidance from Cal. State, Northridge and became a licensed M.F.T., most recently working with emotionally disturbed children.

Her lifelong interest in photography allowed her to teach special needs children at a variety of institutions and was a volunteer photographer for the Inner City Arts program. In addition, she was the Staff Photographer for Diavolo: an internationally renowned dance company based in Los Angeles.

Mara’s photographs have been featured in numerous exhibitions. Most recently, her work has been included in “15 Personal Projects” at LACP; 2017 exhibition: “Photo Shoot” at Black Box Gallery: 2017 International Nude Art Exhibition through Fusion Art; SE Center for Photography 2017 Open Exhibition; 2017 California Open at the TAG Gallery; 1st Annual Photographic Competition and Exhibition 2017 at L.A. Art Core; 2017 exhibit “Water and Sky” at bGGallery/ Bleicher Gorman Gallery at Bergamot Station, as well as a Finalist in the 8th Julia Margaret Cameron Award held in Berlin in 2016. She is an active member of the Los Angeles Art Association and LACP. She lives and works in Santa Monica.

©Michael Hacker, Rock and Roll Denny’s

©Michael Hacker, Xmas Night Skyline

©Michael Hacker, Ice Company

Everything Passes is a series of images made by Michael Hacker in Hollywood in 1987 and 1988, capturing the time just before the neighborhoods were changed forever by massive development. Almost everything in these photos is now gone. The passage of thirty years has transformed them from an objective document of a moment into a bittersweet memory of color and space.

Michael Hacker is a photographer, filmmaker and writer based in Los Angeles. He works mainly in neo-realist color photography, intersecting traditional street and urban landscape work.

Up to now, Hacker’s photography has been mostly private but he has recently begun making work for public exhibition. As a writer, Hacker has completed numerous screenplays, multiple works for the theater, and shorter non-fiction pieces. As a filmmaker he has written, directed and produced three full-length films, including the 1996 narrative feature, The Destiny Of Marty Fine. Since 2005, he has worked as a producer in documentaries for television, including work for Red Bull TV, The History Channel, and NBCUniversal.

Do our hands really tell us something about ourselves and our future? Talk to the Hand is a collaborative inquiry among palmist, subjects, and Michelle Elkins. This series combines photographs of each subject’s hand, an ink handprint, and the subject’s honest response to the palmist’s reading.

Michelle Elkins is a southern California based artist who examines relationships between light, science, various artistic mediums as they relate to humanity.

After 20 years as a technology executive, Michelle began to pursue her passion of photography along with her continuing dedication to volunteerism.

Michelle has a degree in Business Management from Pepperdine Graziadio School of Business. She has completed the Fine Art Photography certificatein the one-year program at Los Angeles Center of Photography.

Sharon Johnson-Tennant’s A Stilled Life explores the core of what is important in her life by combining collected elements from the natural world and the essence of her children to create a new way of looking at beauty and memory.

Sharon Johnson-Tennant was born in Columbia, South Carolina. She received a BA in Fine Arts from Skidmore College, in Saratoga Springs, New York. During a career in NYC in textile and fashion design, she continued with her studies in Color Theory at NYU.

After a move to Los Angeles, Sharon shifted her focus to photography. Her work is about making the invisible visible, and finding beauty in it’s details. Sharon’s photographs are held in private collections and have been featured in galleries and exhibitions nationwide. Her work has been published by Sony Pictures, PDN Magazine, National Geographic Travel Magazine and Travel and Leisure. In addition, her work has been featured in the Huffington Post, The Lost Angeles Times, PDN, Artslant, Lenscratch, Clickblog Italy Canon and Clickblog France Nikon. Sharon has won numerous awards including the Julia Margaret Cameron Award and the IPA International Photo Award.

She is represented by the Robert Berman Gallery in Los Angeles, B-6 Gallery in San Francisco and Art Project Paia in Maui. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

©Wayne Swanson

In From the Workshop, Wayne Swanson explores the creative impulse by focusing on the furniture created by his father. Using individual prints, grids, collages, and 3-dimensional constructions, he evokes his father’s work process, sophisticated woodworking techniques, creative detail, and devotion to his work. The resulting images celebrate the passion of a craftsman.

Wayne Swanson is a fine art and documentary photographer living in San Diego. He is drawn to imagery related to time, memory, atmosphere, a sense of place, and a subtle sense of humor.

Born and raised in Chicago, he graduated from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University with a B.S. in Journalism. His career has included writing and photography for newspapers, magazines, book publishers, and corporate clients. His fine art photography has been included in juried exhibitions in Los Angeles, San Diego, New York, Boston, Houston, Fort Collins, and more. He has been featured in publications including Shots Magazine, The Hand Magazine, Lenscratch, Aint-Bad, and Float.

As a writer, he is a contributing editor for PhotoBook Journal.

Moscow –LA is an ongoing project that Yulia Tregub Morris has been working on since she moved to Los Angeles from Moscow in 2013. These images convey the way she sees, feels, and adjusts to living in a new home, and how she experiences Moscow when she returns as a visitor. Sometimes they are blurred, or show overlapping thoughts of two significant cities in her life.

Yulia Tregub Morris is a Los Angeles based photographer, whose work explores people in their environment, daily life, and moments in between.

Yulia was born in Moscow, Russia, where she studied Business Management.

Her photography journey began in 2009 at the Moscow bureau of the Associated Press. Pulitzer prize-winning photographer Alexander Zemlianichenko recognized her talent and soon became her mentor in photography. She photographed fashion shows, theatre performances, daily news and protests, contributing to the Associated Press.

In 2013 she immigrated to the United States and has been working as a freelance photographer, concentrating on fine art photography. Her work has been included in numerous exhibitions, including the Moscow State Museum “House of Burganov”, Fotoloft Gallery at Winzavod, Moscow, Jeanie Madsen Gallery, Santa Monica, SmashBox studios, The Hive Gallery, Touchon&Co Gallery, Los Angeles Center of Photography, stARTup Art Fair in Los Angeles, and Culver City Art Walk. Yulia’s photographs have been featured in Time, Washington Post, New York Daily News, San Francisco Chronicle, Arizona Daily Star, The New Indian Express, The Moscow News, Leica Russia and other online or print news outlets.

Tags: Andy House, Beth Dubber, Carissa Dorson, Elisa Haber, Ellen Friedlander, Hilary White, Julia Bennett, Kristina Shires, Krysia Lukkason, Mara Zaslove, Michael Hacker, Michelle Elkins, Sharon Johnson-Tennant, Wayne Swanson, Yulia Morris