About

LENSCRATCH is a daily journal that explores contemporary photography and offers opportunities for exposure and community. Created in 2007, Aline Smithson set a goal of writing about a different photographer each day, presenting work in a way that allows for a deeper understanding of a photographer’s intent and vision.

Since its inception, LENSCRATCH has featured the work of thousands of photographers and has provided a platform to launch portfolios and books and is a rich resource for educators and photographers. LENSCRATCH is a media partner to numerous photography festivals and organizations such as CENTER, Filter Photo Festival, Medium Photo Festival, and Blue Earth Alliance.

Aline Smithson, Founder and Editor-in-Chief

Aline Smithson is a Los Angeles based artist best known for her conceptual portraiture and a practice that uses humor and pathos to explore ideas of childhood, aging, and the humanity that connects us. She received a BA from the University of California at Santa Barbara and was accepted into the College of Creative Studies, studying under artists such as William Wegman, Allen Ruppersburg, and Charles Garabian. After a career as a New York Fashion Editor working along side the greats of fashion photography, Aline returned to Los Angeles and her own artistic practice.

She has exhibited widely including over 40 solo shows at institutions such as the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Art, the Shanghai, Lishui, and Pingyqo Festivals in China, The Rayko Photo Center in San Francisco, the Center of Fine Art Photography in Colorado, the Tagomago Gallery in Barcelona and Paris, and the Verve Gallery in Santa Fe. In addition, her work is held in a number of public collections and her photographs have been featured in numerous publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, PDN (cover), the PDN Photo Annual, Communication Arts Photo Annual, Eyemazing, Soura, Visura, Shots, Pozytyw, and Silvershotz magazines.

Aline is the Founder and Editor- in-Chief of Lenscratch, a daily journal on photography and  has been teaching at the Los Angeles Center of Photography since 2001. In 2012, Aline received the Rising Star Award through the Griffin Museum of Photography for her contributions to the photographic community. In 2014, Aline’s work was selected for the Critical Mass Top 50 and she received the Excellence in Teaching Award from CENTER. In 2015, the Magenta Foundation published her first significant monograph, Self & Others: Portrait as Autobiography. In 2016, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum commissioned Aline to a series of portraits for the upcoming Faces of Our Planet Exhibition. Her work is currently on exhibition with the National Portrait Gallery in London as a finalist in the Taylor Wessing Prize. Kris Graves Projects commissioned Aline to create LOST II: Los Angeles to be published in April 2019. She is a dedicated film shooter.

Clay Lipsky, Art Director

Clay Lipsky is the Art Director for LENSCRATCH, an Emmy Award winning graphic designer, a fine art photographer and usually a dude that abides. He was raised in Florida and moved steadily westward applying his unique visual style in print, on air and online. Yet after years of pushing pixels for others Clay experienced a new-found interest with the photographic medium. Consequently he is now focused on pursuing photography as fine art. His work has been exhibited in various shows including those at the Annenberg Space for Photography, Pink Art Fair Seoul, Ballarat Foto Bienale and The Impossible Project Spaces in NYC & Warsaw, Poland. Clay has also been published internationally in print and online, most notably through Esquire Russia, Wired Italia, Yahoo! Germany, Diffusion and Shots Magazines.

Jonas Yip, Technical Director

Jonas Yip claims to be a photographer and musician. Sure, his fine art photographic work has been exhibited internationally, published in a monograph (Paris: Dialogues and Meditations, Nanjing University Press, 2008) and accepted into the permanent collections of the San Diego Museum of Art and National Museum of Chinese Literature in Beijing. And yeah, he records and releases music with a few bands and as a solo producer, and occasionally pops up on a stage somewhere in Los Angeles. But with this new gig as LENSCRATCH Technical Director the truth emerges: he’s secretly still a techie at heart hacking away at websites and, despite his best efforts, unable to the fully suppress the years of Silicon Valley hi-tech startup madness.

Brian Van de Wettering, Managing Editor

Brian Van de Wetering is a photographic artist living and working in San Diego, California where he was born and raised. Brian has had an interest in the arts since his youth and dabbled in acting, lighting design, set design, music, and the visual arts including painting, sculpture, and collage. During college he worked at San Diego’s Old Globe Theater as a stagehand. A degree in computer science and minor in English led to a career in software development while playing in a punk band provided an artistic outlet. But his interest in the visual arts remained unfulfilled.

In 2010, success in the Anza Borrego Foundation’s annual Desert Photo Contest inspired Brian to seriously pursue an artistic practice centered around photography as his primary tool. He continues to develop his unique artistic vision with projects and interests including self portraiture, the constructed image, and conceptual work. He incorporates a wide variety of cameras and techniques in his work including medium format film, toy cameras, home-built cameras, mobile phone photography, and light painting.

Since 2010, Brian’s work has been featured in numerous juried exhibitions around the United States including at the DNJ Gallery in Santa Monica, The Los Angeles Center of Photography, and the PhotoPlace Gallery in Vermont among others. His work has been featured by Jonathan Blaustein on aphotoeditor.com and by Aline Smithson on Lenscratch.com. Brian is currently the Managing Editor of Lenscratch and a founding partner and Chief Technology Officer at Parallel Interactive. And Brian continues to play in the Irish punk band he helped found more than 20 years ago.

Katie Harwood, Director of Marketing

Katie Harwood is an artist and photographer based in Colorado. She earned an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and a BA from Columbia College Chicago. Most recently, Harwood received the Innovations in Imaging award from the Society for Photographic Education for her series Everything Is Fine Here. She is the Founder & Navigator at Big Bad Bettie Press, a small publishing company dedicated to the image and the object. Her work has been exhibited widely in the US, exists in private and museum collections, and has been published in online journals such as Don’t Take Pictures and F-Stop. Working in an expanded documentary style, Harwood’s work explores ideas of kin, environment, and suburbia and the oddities that happen in these spaces.

Val Patterson, Social Media Editor

Val Patterson is the Social Media Editor for LENSCRATCH, and a Los Angeles artist specializing in fine art portraiture, travel and landscape photography. Her work has been exhibited in group shows, and published online and in print internationally. Val is an advocate for women’s causes and has created The Pink Project and The Mona Lisa Project, both photography books in support of the fight against breast cancer and her favorite charity, RAINN. When she doesn’t have a camera in her hands, Val enjoys pinball, opera and archery. She secretly hopes to one day make it onto the U.S. Olympic Archery Team.

Patty Lemke, Resource Editor

Patty Lemke is a third generation native Angelino with a penchant for plastic cameras and b/w photography. When not assisting workshops at the Los Angeles Center for Photography, Patty packs up her gear and heads out for destinations to be determined upon arrival. Always along for the ride is Patty’s personal assistant, a now 13year old dog named Arbor.

Her award winning images of the Albuquerque International Balloon Festival are Patty’s most recognizable images to date. Shot before sunrise and printed in quiet monotones these images have been exhibited at galleries across the United States as well as various publications and international on line venues.

Crossing into digital, Patty has a couple of projects percolating; portraits of the Mojave Desert with its various denizens and time lapse films documenting the urban sprawl that is Los Angeles.

Julia Bennett, Visual Media Editor

Julia Bennett is the LENSCRATCH Visual Media Editor, a fine art photographer, book artist, and marine scientist exploring the intersections between science, visual art, and the contemporary social landscape. Julia’s work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and abroad, including the Columbia Museum of Art (SC), CSIRO (AUS), and The Pence Gallery (CA). Her photographs have been published both online and in print, most notably through WIRED, Featureshoot, and PetaPixel, and she has received numerous grants and awards for her work photographing plankton in the series Into the Umbra.

When she isn’t exploring the world with her Mamiya, Julia is contemplating whether adopting a dog is a good idea and trying to wean herself off coffee. At the moment, Julia is based in Los Angeles, CA.

Paula Riff, Resource Editor

Paula Riff is a Los Angeles based artist known for creating one of a kind camera-less photographic works on paper that embrace bold colors, form and design. She combines the historical processes of cyanotype and gum bichromate allowing her a physical and intimate relationship with the materials that she uses to push the boundaries of the medium while considering  themes of abstraction and the natural world.

Paula graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Japanese language and worked as an interpreter in Tokyo, Japan for several years.  Returning to Los Angeles, she switched careers after gaining an internship at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the photo department.  Her work was selected for the Top 50 Critical Mass Award of 2018 and was a 2018 finalist for the Julia Margaret Cameron Award for Women in the Alternative Process Category. Her work has appeared in numerous museums, galleries, publications and exhibitions throughout the U.S and internationally. Paula’s work is also held in private collections.

Daniel George, Submissions Editor