In a time where digital photography is available to the masses, making everyone a photographer, the appeal of a practice that is tangible, tactile, and slowed down, has brought back a roaring interest in all things analog. On April 10th and 11th, the Los Angeles Center of Photography will host the first (and hopefully annual) ANALOG CON.

The inaugural AnalogCon also marks a milestone for the local photographic ecosystem: the 80^th anniversary of Freestyle Photographic & Imaging Supplies – a powerhouse whose dedication to film and printing has shaped image-making in Los Angeles.

This two day event is chock filled with over a dozen exhibitors showcasing new papers, films, and products, Artist Talks, Panel Discussions, Demonstrations, Photo Walks, the opening of the Fast Forward Analog Exhibition…and even food trucks and videos of analog practices.

Current Schedule of Events (subject to change)

FRIDAY NIGHT 4-8pm
5:00 pm: Exhibitors Roundtable Discussion featuring Kodak, Harman Technologies, Richard Photo Lab, Negative Supply and Freestyle

6:00 pm: Panel Discussion with Analog Photographers: Aline Smithson, Hiroshi Watanabe, and Marcus Ubungen, Moderator: Rotem Rozental

7:00 pm:  Fast Forward Analog Exhibition Opens

SATURDAY 9am-6pm
9:00 am: Lomography with Chloe Fuller PHOTO WALK – Gloria Molina Grand Park ($10 admission – register HERE)

10:00 am: Eric Joseph from Freestyle PRINITING DEMO

11:00 am: Film cameras with Caleb Knueven PHOTO WALK – Grand Central Market ($10 admission – register HERE)

11:00 am: Thomas Alleman ARTIST TALK

12:00 pm: Andrew Thompson LUMEN PRSENTATION/DEMO

12:00 pm: Ali LeRoi ARTIST WALK-THROUGH

1:00 pm: Tracy Chandler ARTIST TALK

2:00 pm: Negative Supply/Capture One PRESENTATION/DEMO

3:00 pm: Jason Lee ARTIST TALK

4:00 pm: Holga with Thomas Alleman PHOTO WALK –Little Tokyo ($10 admission – register HERE)

4:00 pm: Willow Belle EMULSION LIFT PRESENTATION

5:00 pm: Siri Kaur ARTIST TALK

 SATURDAY food truck vendors

12 -2pm Kogi BBQ Food Truck (food for purchase)
4-6pm Las Guajolotas Tacos Food Truck (food for purchas

Meet some of the presenters:

JASON LEE

©Jason Lee, Valentine, Texas, 2017, from the book A PLAIN VIEW

©Jason Lee, Highway 70 east of Spearman, Texas, 2017, from the book A PLAIN VIEW

A native of Southern California, Jason Lee is a photographer, director, and actor. Having established a successful career as a professional skateboarder during skateboarding’s pivotal late 80s and early 90s period, Lee would go on to pursue a career in acting, which would lead to working in film, television, and voiceover, and with such directors as Kevin Smith, Lawrence Kasdan, Cameron Crowe, and Rebecca Miller. In 2001, Lee developed a passion for photography and dedicated himself to pursuing the medium as a creative profession. His photographic works have since been featured in multiple group and solo exhibitions, magazines and books, with A PLAIN VIEW (2018) representing Lee’s first official photo book and the debut publication for Film Photographic, the independent imprint Lee founded in 2015, now defunct. Prior to the release of A PLAIN VIEW, in 2016, Texas-based Refueled magazine published a special limited edition hardcover issue featuring an extensive selection of Lee’s American instant film photographs spanning 2006 to 2016. June 2019 saw the opening of OK: Jason Lee Photographs, Lee’s debut museum exhibition. Commissioned by Tulsa’s Philbrook Museum of Art and on view through December 2019, the exhibition featured selected Oklahoma photographs spanning the Meinig and Burnstein Galleries in the museum’s former satellite location, Philbrook Downtown (now Bob Dylan Center). A selection of Larry Clark’s original Tulsa prints were concurrently presented in the adjacent Smith Gallery. In December 2020, UK publisher Stanley/Barker released IN THE GOLD DUST RUSH, featuring a selection of Lee’s previously unpublished American black-and-white photographs spanning 2008 to 2020. Preceding the release of ITGDR, in November 2020, at the request of Galveston Historical Foundation, Lee traveled to Galveston, Texas, to make photographs on the island for a special book release to help commemorate the foundation’s 2021 sesquicentennial. The result is Galveston (2021), a 176-page offering that features 98 color and black-and-white images accompanied by an essay on the island’s history by Will Gillham, Head of Publications, Amon Carter Museum of American Art. Lee has since published three additional books, with several more titles in the works.

Instagram: @jasonlee

SIRI KAUR

©Siri Kaur, Superman

©Siri Kaur, Wonder Woman

Siri Kaur is an artist and photographer who examines identities that occupy dualities, diversity, and contradiction, with a rigorous eye for the photographic quality of magic. She received her MFA from The California Institute of the Arts, and an MA and a BA from Smith College. Recent exhibitions include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Vincent Price Art Museum, the Riverside Art Museum, the Lancaster Museum of Art and History, the San Antonio Museum of Art, the Aperture Foundation, the Portland Museum of Art, and the Camera Club of New York, among others. Kaur’s work has been reviewed in ARTFORUM, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. She was a Professor of Fine Arts at Otis College of Art and Design from 2007-2018 and currently teaches at UCLA. Kaur’s book Sistermoon was published by Photo Void in October 2025. You can find more about Kaur and her work at www.sirikaur.com or on Instagram @sirikaur.

TRACY L CHANDLER

©Tracy L Chandler, from A Poor Sort of Memory

©Tracy L Chandler, from A Poor Sort of Memory

Instagram: @tracylchandler 

THOMAS ALLEMAN

©Thomas Alleman, from Sunshine and Noir

©Thomas Alleman, from Sunshine and Noir

Thomas Alleman was born and raised in Detroit, where his father was a traveling salesman and his mother was a ceramic artist. He graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in English Literature.Chief Executive, People, Priority, Acoustic Guitar, Private Clubs,Time for Kids, Diverse and Library Journal. In the late 1990s, Tom exhibited “Social Studies”, a series of street photographs, widely in Southern California. He’s currently finishing “Sunshine & Noir”, a book-length collection of black-and-white urban landscapes made in the neighborhoods of Los Angeles. “Sunshine & Noir” had it’s solo debut at the Afterimage Gallery in Dallas in April 2006. Subsequent solo exhibitions include: the Robin Rice Gallery in New York in November 2008, the Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, OR in October 2009, the Xianshwan Photo Festival in Inner Mongolia, China, in 2010 , California State at Chico, in 2011, and the Duncan Miller Gallery in Los Angeles, February 2013. Fifty-three of Tom’s photographs of gay San Francisco, shot between 1985 and 1988, debuted at the Jewett Gallery in San Francisco in December 2012, under the title, “Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws”.

Instagram: @thomasallemanphoto

HIROSHI WATANABE

©Hiroshi Watanabe, Big, Suo Sarumawashi

©Hiroshi Watanabe, Aikichi, Suo Sarumawashi

Hiroshi Watanabe is a California-based Japanese photographer. Born in Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan in 1951, Watanabe graduated from the Department of Photography of Nihon University in 1975 and moved to Los Angeles where he worked as a production coordinator for Japanese television commercials and later co-founded a Japanese coordination services company.

He obtained an MBA from UCLA in 1993, but two years later his earlier interest in photography revived; from 2000 he has worked full-time at photography. After five self-published books, Watanabe’s first to be published conventionally was I See Angels Every Day, monochrome portraits of the patients and other scenes within San Lázaro psychiatric hospital in Quito, Ecuador. This won the 2007 Photo City Sagamihara award for Japanese professional photographers.

In 2005, a portfolio of his work was featured in Nueva Luz photographic journal, volume 10#3. In 2007 Watanabe won a “Critical Mass” award from Photolucida that allowed publication of his monograph Findings. Watanabe’s works are in the permanent collections of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, George Eastman House and Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

Instagram: @hiroshiwatanabe_photography

MARCUS UBUNGEN 

©Marcus Ubungen, Sue

©Marcus Ubungen, Skip

Marcus Ubungen is an LA–based director and photographer whose work spans documentary, portraiture, and commercial filmmaking. His practice is rooted in human connection and curiosity, often using 8×10 large format photography to slow down and create more intentional portraits. After losing his home in the Altadena fire, he began an ongoing body of work reflecting on loss, memory, and place in its aftermath. Marcus is a two-time SFFILM Resident Filmmaker, a Vimeo Staff-Picked filmmaker, and a member of the Directors Guild of America.

Instagram: @yourpalmarcus

ALINE SMITHSON

©Aline Smithson, Favorite Condiment

©Aline Smithson, Would They Remember? Hand Painted Silver Gelatin Print 16 x 20

Aline Smithson is an interdisciplinary artist, editor, filmmaker, and educator based in Los Angeles, California. She has exhibited widely including over 50 solo shows at a variety of international institutions and her work has been featured in publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, and PDN.

Smithson is the Founder and Editor- in-Chief of Lenscratch, a daily journal on photography.  In 2012, she received the Rising Star Award through the Griffin Museum of Photography for her contributions to the photographic community and she also received the prestigious Excellence in Teaching Award from CENTER. In 2014 and 2019, Smithson’s work was selected for the Critical Mass Top 50.  In 2015, the Magenta Foundation published her first significant monograph, Self & Others: Portrait as Autobiography, and in 2016, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum commissioned Smithson to create a series of portraits for the upcoming Faces of Our Planet Exhibition. In 2018 and 2019, her work was exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery in London as part of the Taylor Wessing Prize. Kris Graves Projects published her book, LOST II: Los Angeles and included her work in SOLACE and On Death. Peanut Press released her monograph, Fugue State, in Fall of 2021. In 2022, she was named a Hasselblad Heroine.

Instagram: @alinesmithson

WILLOW BELLE

Portrait of Willow Belle

Willow Belle working on an Emulsion Lift

Los Angeles based artist Willow Belle pushes the boundaries between analog photography and fine art, navigating permanence in subject, material, and technique. Working with unconventional methods and matter, she relinquishes control to the unorthodox, allowing light and chemistry to become her collaborators. Her work appears untethered to physical existence, yet manifests from the tangible.

Instagram: @wiillowbelle

ANDREW K THOMPSON

©Andrew K Thompson_Untitled (Phytogram on Harman Direct Positive paper)_2026_Silver gelatin photo paper, 10x8in

©Andrew K Thompson_Untitled (Phytogram on Harman Direct Positive paper)_2026_Silver gelatinephoto paper, 10x8in

Andrew K. Thompson is a photographic artist and educator working in the Inland Empire of California. His work has been exhibited at the California Museum of Photography, the Lancaster Museum of Art and History, the Riverside Art Museum, the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture, the Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum of Art, and the Center for Fine Art Photography.

His images are featured in Silver Reset: Pursuing a Second Light (2026), published by Curiouso Lab, BACK TO BASICS: Extended Recipes for Ecological Photochemistry (2025), published by The Sustainable Darkroom, and In the Sunshine of Neglect: Defining Photographs and Radical Experiments in Inland Southern California – 1950 to the Present (2019), published by Inlandia Institute.

In 2025, Thompson was awarded the Steven Craig Thomas Photography Award by the Ontario Museum of History & Art and the Lecturer of the Year for the College of Arts & Letters at CSU, San Bernardino.

CALEB KNUEVEN

©Caleb Knueven

©Caleb Knueven

Caleb Knueven is a Los Angeles–based film photographer and the guy behind Bad Flashes, a YouTube channel dedicated to the art, process, and frequent disasters of shooting film. He grew up in a military family that relocated every four years, which either gave him a great eye for exploring new places or just made it impossible to sit still … probably both. You can usually find him poking around crumbling buildings with his Leica M6, hunting down good BBQ, or parked at his desk editing another episode with an alarming quantity of Atomic Fireballs nearby.

Instagram: @calebknueven