Las Fotos Catalyst Awardees: Ketzally Alcala and Djeneba Aduayom
Every October Las Fotos Projects honors six artists in 3 categories: SELF-EXPRESSION: For those who are purposefully disrupting mainstream photography, ADVOCACY: For power in photojournalism or use of photography for use in community advocacy or social justice, and CATALYST: For those who are purposefully disrupting mainstream photography.
Today we celebrate two artists in the Catalyst category, one a student, Ketzally Alcala and one a professional, Djeneba Aduayom. The 5th Annual Foto Awards takes place tonight, October 21st 2023 and if you are in Los Angeles, we encourage you to come.
Interviews with the artists follow.
Ketzally Alcala
What in your background, your family’s history or the place you come from inspired you to pursue the work you do?
Ketzally: My heritage has always been greatly present in my day to day life. As I began to experiment with my art and find my own style, I quickly realized that all of my images were a reflection of myself, my family and my lineage. A lot if not all of my inspiration for every image carefully curated is all drawn from my heritage from the land itself to every single story I’ve been told. It’s all played a role in how I approach my art.
What can you tell us about the interaction with the subjects photographed in your portfolio? What was your connection to them? How did it unfold? Did you discover or learn anything that surprised you?
Ketzally: My portfolio is curated carefully, I try my best to include a range of different photographic niches. As for my subjects I like to include folks who I hold a close relationship with because I strongly believe that my photographs, whether they are candid or not, are very intimate moments and having a close relationship emphasizes this much more. They’re intimate to me because some if not all of my subjects and I hold cultural similarities.
Ketzally Alcala, a 17-year-old photographer based in East Los Angeles. Throughout her
photography journey, she has been able to experiment with different niches but specializes in
portrait, editorial and lifestyle. As seen in her work, Ketzally incorporates her indigenous roots
and beliefs into each image curated. She feels as if it is her mission to shed light into her
community and people.
Growing up in a predominantly brown community, she observed her surroundings and
found that there was a lack of brown voices being uplifted. Through her work she hopes to elicit
a sense of belonging and comfort. For a big period in her life she questioned where she belonged and where her place in the world was. She felt a sense of misplacement. Through images, she is able to create memories that allow her to retrace her identity when in moments of self-reflection.
Instagram: @k3yzally
© Ketzally Alcala
© Ketzally Alcala
© Ketzally Alcala
© Ketzally Alcala
© Ketzally Alcala
© Ketzally Alcala
© Ketzally Alcala
© Ketzally Alcala
Djeneba Aduayom
When was the last time a photograph drove you to action? What was it?
Djeneba: The deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Mahsa Amini, and so many others—tragic losses of life that should not have happened in this day and age… It sometimes feels like humanity is going backward.
What made you want to create self portraits, to turn your camera toward your own body?
Djeneba: The series of self portraits was a direct result of the pandemic. Just a year before that, I was telling a friend that I was never interested in self portraiture! When the pandemic hit, my whole innerself collapsed with anxiety. During any stressful period in my life, I’ve found creativity takes over and is what gets me out of the darkness. In this situation, the world stopped at once. The forced isolation meant that no contact with other humans was possible to create new photography projects. I needed a mental escape and decided to process my emotions through a series of personal self portraits with whatever I could find at home—using my wardrobe, packaging materials, paper, and other elements to create little vignettes inspired by my current mood and mental state. This turned out to be an act of therapy and helped to keep me searching for the light during a rather dark period.
You mixed media work, combining performance and photography articulates a coherent aesthetics and visual language. What can you share about the process and developing your visual approach?
Djeneba: I find it hard to explain my process because everything is emotional and comes from the gut with me. My process, like myself, has multiple layers. It usually starts with an emotion, sensation, or feeling; sometimes ideas appear as a visual sketch in my mind. My process tends to take me through an emotional journey that I then express abstractly in various forms—from photography to multimedia to performance, and so on. My photography is especially inspired by the stories of my subjects and I respond to their energy intuitively. My intent is always to elevate anyone in front of my camera and make them feel truly seen. When I work with others I see it as a collaborative process.
Djeneba Aduayom is a self-taught artist whose work is marked by a sense of movement, performance, and personal interrogation. Her aesthetic is as much influenced by her multidisciplinary training and extensive travels, as it is by her multicultural heritage.
Aduayom always seeks to capture layers of emotions contained within people, often with hints of abstraction and surrealism. The ability to speak multiple visual languages, both literally and metaphorically, fuels her inspiration and creative output. The imaginative worlds she builds invite her viewers inwards and beckons them to travel to a universe of their very own making.
Aduayom believes we are complex beings that are united by underlying commonalities. The human experience is more universal and uniting than individual and derisive. Dualities exist, juxtaposing against one another in striking and complementary ways. These observations are at the core of her creative expression.
Instagram: @djeneba.aduayom/
©Djeneba Aduayom
©Djeneba Aduayom, Reflected Reverie
©Djeneba AduayomI
©Djeneba AduayomI
Djeneba AduayomI
©Djeneba AduayomI, Nyang
©Djeneba Aduayom, Reflected Reverie
©Djeneba Aduayom, Asphodele
About Rotem Rozental, Executive Director, Los Angeles Center of Photography:
Rotem Rozental, Ph.D, is the Executive Director of the Los Angeles Center of Photography. Between 2016-2022, she served as Chief Curator at American Jewish University, where she was also Assistant Dean of the Whizin Center for Continuing Education and Senior Director of Arts and Creative Programming. Her book, Pre-State Photographic Archives and the Zionist Movement was published I 2023 by Routledge. Rotem lectures at the Critical Studies Department of USC Roski School of Art and Design and teaches seminars about photo-theory at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. She contributes regularly to magazines, journals and exhibition catalogues. Her writings about contemporary art and image-based media, as well as Jewish and Israeli art, were published in Artforum.com, Photographies, Jewish Currents, Tables and Forward, among other outlets.
Instagram: @rotroz/
Instagram: @la_centerofphoto/
Las Fotos Project’s mission is to elevate the voices of teenage girls and gender-expansive youth from communities of color through photography and mentoring, empowering them to channel their creativity for the benefit of themselves, their community, and future careers.
Las Fotos Project was launched to provide opportunities for those who are both systemically and socially silenced to make themselves heard and, in the process, advocate for social change and create their own pathways to successful, creative futures. Our program model further reinforces photography’s inherent ability to spark introspection, evoke deeper meaning, and serve as a catalyst for change by placing students at the heart of social justice efforts in their respective communities.
Las Fotos Project was founded in 2010 by Los Angeles-based photographer Eric V. Ibarra after seeing a need for teenage girls throughout Los Angeles to have a skill that could help build their confidence and self-esteem. In March of 2011, Las Fotos Project became a project of Community Partners, a 501(c)3 organization which accelerates ideas into action to advance the public good. Las Fotos Project has since worked with girls throughout Southern California, and has developed partnership with national and international nonprofit organizations and schools to expand the movement of inspiring teenage girls through photography and self-expression. Our current focus is on the Central, South, and East Los Angeles regions of Los Angeles.
Posts on Lenscratch may not be reproduced without the permission of the Lenscratch staff and the photographer.
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![In the early morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963, four members of the United Klans of AmericaÑThomas Edwin Blanton Jr.,Herman Frank Cash, Robert Edward Chambliss, and Bobby Frank CherryÑplanted a minimum of 15 sticks of dynamite with a time delay under the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, close to the basement.
At approximately 10:22 a.m., an anonymous man phoned the 16th Street Baptist Church. The call was answered by the acting Sunday School secretary: a 14-year-old girl named Carolyn Maull. To Maull, the anonymous caller simply said the words, "Three minutes", before terminating the call. Less than one minute later, the bomb exploded as five children were present within the basement assembly, changing into their choir robes in preparation for a sermon entitled "A Love That Forgives". According to one survivor, the explosion shook the entire building and propelled the girls' bodies through the air "like rag dolls".
The explosion blew a hole measuring seven feet in diameter in the church's rear wall, and a crater five feet wide and two feet deep in the ladies' basement lounge, destroying the rear steps to the church and blowing one passing motorist out of his car. Several other cars parked near the site of the blast were destroyed, and windows of properties located more than two blocks from the church were also damaged. All but one of the church's stained-glass windows were destroyed in the explosion. The sole stained-glass window largely undamaged in the explosion depicted Christ leading a group of young children.
Hundreds of individuals, some of them lightly wounded, converged on the church to search the debris for survivors as police erected barricades around the church and several outraged men scuffled with police. An estimated 2,000 black people, many of them hysterical, converged on the scene in the hours following the explosion as the church's pastor, the Reverend John Cross Jr., attempted to placate the crowd by loudly reciting the 23rd Psalm through a bullhorn. One individual who converged on the scene to help search for survivors, Charles Vann, later recollected that he had observed a solitary white man whom he recognized as Robert Edward Chambliss (a known member of the Ku Klux Klan) standing alone and motionless at a barricade. According to Vann's later testimony, Chambliss was standing "looking down toward the church, like a firebug watching his fire".
Four girls, Addie Mae Collins (age 14, born April 18, 1949), Carol Denise McNair (age 11, born November 17, 1951), Carole Robertson (age 14, born April 24, 1949), and Cynthia Wesley (age 14, born April 30, 1949), were killed in the attack. The explosion was so intense that one of the girls' bodies was decapitated and so badly mutilated in the explosion that her body could only be identified through her clothing and a ring, whereas another victim had been killed by a piece of mortar embedded in her skull. The then-pastor of the church, the Reverend John Cross, would recollect in 2001 that the girls' bodies were found "stacked on top of each other, clung together". All four girls were pronounced dead on arrival at the Hillman Emergency Clinic.
More than 20 additional people were injured in the explosion, one of whom was Addie Mae's younger sister, 12-year-old Sarah Collins, who had 21 pieces of glass embedded in her face and was blinded in one eye. In her later recollections of the bombing, Collins would recall that in the moments immediately before the explosion, she had observed her sister, Addie, tying her dress sash.[33] Another sister of Addie Mae Collins, 16-year-old Junie Collins, would later recall that shortly before the explosion, she had been sitting in the basement of the church reading the Bible and had observed Addie Mae Collins tying the dress sash of Carol Denise McNair before she had herself returned upstairs to the ground floor of the church.](https://lenscratch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/001-16th-Street-Baptist-Church-Easter-v2-14x14-150x150.jpg)
