LENSCRATCH - Fine Art Photography Daily

Review Santa Fe: Lulu Hamilton: Even if Only Just For Right Now by Epiphany KnedlerFebruary 4, 2026

©Lulu Hamilton, Zoë in the Green Room, 2025

In early November 2025, I was invited to CENTER’s Review Santa Fe. Being my first time in the Southwest and experience on the Reviewer side of the table, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. As an educator, I love reviewing work; when others hear “critique,” they may shy away, but I love the experience of helping others through their ideas. Review Santa Fe is an incredibly welcoming experience, carefully cultivating meaningful projects and conversations. Living in a very rural area, this was an inspiring opportunity to see what is on the horizon of the photo world. I’m so excited to share a few of these projects over the first week of February.

Today, we’ll be sharing Lulu Hamilton’s Even if Only Just For Right Now.

©Lulu Hamilton, Abbie Waking Up, 2025

Lulu Hamilton (B. 2001) is a visual artist with a primary focus in photography. She holds a B.F.A. in Photography from the Savannah College of Art and Design. Hamilton’s work is an ongoing exploration of the tenderness and vulnerability involved in the social dance of being human. Her childhood experience with chronic Lyme disease led her to develop a fascination with the bodily experience and interpersonal connection. Her most recent project, Even if Only Just For Right Now, serves as a visual diary documenting the treasured privilege of intimacy in her relationships. Her interest in human behavior and the role of community in our lives is a throughline in her photographic practice. Her work has been exhibited in SCAD X Leica: Power in Perspective, Les Voyages Lumières, and Lacoste School of the Arts Showcase, amongst others. She has been published in PhotoBook Magazine, Museé Magazine, and The Manor. In 2025, she received an honorable mention in the International Photography Awards for the “Advertising: Fashion” category and was named a Top 200 finalist in Photolucida’s Critical Mass program.

Follow Lulu on Instagram: @lulugrooves

©Lulu Hamilton, Sam Getting Dressed, 2025

Even if Only Just For Right Now

Even if Only Just For Right Now is an ongoing exploration of the tenderness and vulnerability existing within a tight-knit community. In our youth, community can often be intensely close, yet inherently transitory due to the shifting dynamics of young life. This project explores that despite the transience of these connections, or possibly because of it, there exists a powerful ability to be vulnerable, loving, and connected. Taken throughout my last year of college, the photographs emanate the comfort felt between friends who truly know and trust one another. The connections between us feel all the more significant with the intimacy of youth and shared desire.

Having experienced debilitating chronic illness and social isolation as a teenager, I have never taken for granted the ability to love and connect with one another. Connection became a cherished honor and something I was drawn to document out of a desire to preserve it. Moments of vulnerability and closeness are so precious to me now, and I photograph them to capture the depths of human relationships.

The act of collecting these moments was a catalyst for deeper conversation and connection among us, and the project became a cyclical process of tenderness. I was driven by the desire to become closer. The works in this project capture the tactile and emotional qualities of these gentle moments, in which my subject and I are witnesses to one another’s authenticity. A turned back, a tear shed, a moment of quiet self-reflection or physical affection; skin, touching, shifting. Every photograph is a celebration of the limitless expressions of human intimacy.

©Lulu Hamilton, Headstand, 2025

Epiphany Knedler: How did your project come about?

Lulu Hamilton: My project came from a place of yearning—a desire to experience and cultivate intimacy and connection in my life. It is a celebration of my ability to experience intimacy at all. When I was 11 years old, I fell ill with an inexplicable chronic illness that proceeded to strip my life of normalcy and shift my social landscape forever. I was diagnosed with Lyme disease three years later, but was not effectively treated until two years after that. Five years of my adolescence—years in which we are meant to be learning about ourselves and one another and growing deep relationships for the first time—were primarily spent between doctors’ offices and my bed. Recovering from this illness and being cured at 17 was not only physically transformative, but also initiated the navigation of a social environment at school that I had never been fully privy to. The connection I had spent years craving when I was isolated and alone was finally within reach.

I found a community of friends then, one that began to teach me how to love. There was a particular sensitivity to this community, a fragility, knowing we were all so young and our lives would soon go in different directions. And so they did, and I moved a thousand miles away and began searching for that community again. I started to meet people who didn’t know me when I was sick, and had no way of knowing the way I craved intimacy because of it. Yet, without knowing, these relationships began to echo those of my younger years. Time felt infinite; days and nights stretched long and far, and every moment we spent learning about one another felt like we were exactly where we should be. Each relationship brought awareness of depths within them that I didn’t realize were possible. I began to question: What allows relationships to be deepened? How can they be molded with affection? Are we bound by the vulnerability we show to one another?

The underlying transcience of our future once again coated each interaction and late night spent together. It was a comfort to know we were choosing to love each other, even if only just for right now. I began to photograph these people, these moments, as a means to protect them from the passage of time in the only way I knew how: creating an image of them, a visual representation of something that couldn’t be spoken. Memories and moments of vulnerability began to collect, blending intimacy, friendship, and growth until words no longer remained—only feeling.

©Lulu Hamilton, Kiersten and Haley, 2025

EK: Is there a specific image that is your favorite or particularly meaningful to this series?

LH: Zoë in the Green Room is one of my favorites visually and for what it represents. The photograph captured a moment of vulnerability and, in a way, a confession; it required my friend to be as she was, without altering her natural disposition for me or the camera. She had to trust me in the taking of her image, while I had to confess the significance of the moment by taking it– a mutual confession of care. What seems like merely a simple moment is actually a reflection on the intimacy required for sincerity to exist.

©Lulu Hamilton, Eve and Beth at Heaven House, 2025

EK: Can you tell us about your artistic practice?

LH: I treat my practice as a living, breathing thing: I feed it, and in turn, it feeds me. Art has always been my outlet for expression when words can’t capture what can be felt visually. I like to experiment and try new mediums as often as I can to aid in this. Printmaking, painting, alternative process photography, and collage have all found their way into my practice at some point, alongside photography, which I’ve been passionate about since I entered a darkroom for the first time at 17. I value learning over perfection, and I like to let my practice be intuitive rather than forced. My work is fueled by my unending desire to understand, both myself and those I love. At the core of my practice, I celebrate the significance of relationships so that I may never take them for granted, and so that anyone who interacts with my work can recognize the privilege of loving, too.

©Lulu Hamilton, Imprint I, 2025

EK: What’s next for you?

LH: I recently attended Center Santa Fe’s Review Santa Fe, a portfolio review event that offered insight into the future of this project and where it can live in the world. I plan to continue to show this work, ideally in physical spaces, to cultivate community and connection like the kind it was created from. I was recently selected as a finalist for the 2026 Arte Laguna Prize, and two photographs from this project will be exhibited at the Arsenale Nord in Venice, Italy, from November 14 to December 6, 2026. As for my practice, I hope to make work that further explores my experience with Lyme disease and highlights others’ experiences with it, as I believe it is an important story that needs to be told. I will continue to create work examining love, intimacy, and all of their possibilities, as a means of celebrating the significance of community and connection.

©Lulu Hamilton, Cameron in the Garden, 2025

Epiphany Knedler is an interdisciplinary artist + educator exploring the ways we engage with history. She graduated from the University of South Dakota with a BFA in Studio Art and a BA in Political Science and completed her MFA in Studio Art at East Carolina University. She is based in Aberdeen, South Dakota, serving as an Assistant Professor of Art and Coordinator of the Art Department at Northern State University, a Content Editor with LENSCRATCH, and the co-founder and curator of the art collective Midwest Nice Art. Her work has been exhibited in the New York Times, the Guardian, Vermont Center for Photography, Lenscratch, Dek Unu Arts, and awarded through Lensculture, the Lucie Foundation, F-Stop Magazine, and Photolucida Critical Mass.
Follow Epiphany on Instagram: @epiphanysk

Tags: CENTER, Community, Even if Only Just For Right Now, Family, Intimacy, Lulu Hamilton, Portrait, Review Santa Fe