Writing about local politics can be quite draining. Especially when sending public records requests or emailing public officials waiting for a response or no response at all.
Anyway last week I was in attendance at Fahey/Klein Gallery for The School of Los Angeles. The exhibition featured works by some of my favorite photographers. Herb Ritts, Greg Gorman, and Matthew Rolston.
The room was full. People stood close to the photos, talking, looking, sipping, then looking again. The faces are familiar, even when you can’t place them right away. There is the particular confidence of a portrait that knows the camera is there. It doesn’t apologize for being beautiful. It doesn’t explain itself.
I’ve been making photographs since my senior year of high school. For a while, photography became something I carried around in my history instead of something I was doing. That can happen. You get busy with the rest of your life and the thing you love starts to feel like a room you used to live in.
Being there loosened something. I talked with Greg Gorman, looked at the work, and moved through the gallery with people who had come for their own reasons. I just remembered that looking is still a way of being in the world, and that a photograph can hold your attention without asking you to turn it into a lesson.
Fahey/Klein has a way of making the photographs feel close. Not small, exactly. Present. You can stand in front of one and notice the decisions: the light, the expression, the second when a person lets the camera in, or thinks they have.
I left with a few cellphone images of my own and the feeling that I should start developing the hundreds of rolls of film I have sitting in my fridge.
Julian Lucas is the founder and publisher of The Pomonan, as well as a photographer and writer. His work examines art, culture, local government, race, displacement and the social consequences of public policy. And don’t trip out and shit. He knows he needs to update his website.
