Annenberg Space For Photography – CLOSED
$ Art Galleries
2000 Ave Of The Stars
Los Angeles, CA 90067
I know two people who are in the current Emerging exhibit, and yes it’s an EMERGING exhibit, so don’t expect Mary Ellen Mark or Ansel Adams prints to parade around these quarters. It’s a bunch of teenagers, 20-year-olds and some 30-year-olds who know how to use an SLR camera and are … ’emerging’. The photos are supposed to show the relational aspects between photographer and subject. Like preteens photographing other preteens, etc.
As for the two people I knew, Ryan Pfluger was a MySpace friend from back in the day, who appropriately (inappropriately?) did provocative MySpace portraiture of his friends. Some guy’s MySpace photo from 2007 got onto the walls of the Annenberg as part of the exhibit. Justin Maxon, the other photographer I went to school with ten years ago and took a few photo classes with. He used to spend all day photographing homeless people smoking crack and shooting up heroin around Civic Center in San Francisco. I spent a couple of hours with him once. It was invasive shit, click click click click, as smoke from a crack pipe was billowing from the guy’s mouth. The guy seemed so unaffected by the intrusive camera lens a foot away from his face. It was kind of incredibly weird. The actual photo in the exhibit was of a grainy, dark photo of a family living in derelict conditions.
This exhibit showcased people mostly born after 1980. What was funny is that the photo selections they had of these two particular people were not photos I would have chosen of theirs but I suppose were not necessarily bad selections. Just ho-hum, in my opinion. It makes me think about the tons of other photographers on exhibit and how their other photos could potentially be more interesting than the ones the curator chose, which then makes me wish that the space was even larger to show more examples. As for the documentary, there was a documentary playing at the time I went and it was of a pretentious teenage girl talking about her amazing discovery of photography. She was waxing lyrical about the machine and how it was the only way she is able to connect to people: her, her camera, and her friend.
Annenberg Space For Photography is free. The space is not big. But it is free and worth visiting.
Useful: 2 Funny: 1 Cool: 3
8/30/2015