STATE OF PHOTOGRAPHY

Few, if any, unifying themes or styles can be attributed to Dtography in Southern California, or any other cosmopolitan center in the information age. Aided by the Internet and digital image-sharing, the spread of globalism in commerce U as evident in art as it is in food, culture, and clothing. This

is a recent development and with it something is both gained and lost; Los Angeles now rivals New York City in terms of art production and number of exhibition spaces, signaling its progression beyond just another regional art center. Long gone are most cultural signifiers of the place so often derided as lacking culture in the popular imagination. "La-La Land" still exists, but the art world was never really an important part of it and has benefited from never being co-opted by the entertainment industry, which has plenty of problems of its own. The speed of information transfer, proliferating art fairs, and a burgeoning economy have made regionalism a quaint thing of the past for all but the most stubborn or isolated people and places. While this development is mostly a good thing, it has come with a price: distinction. seeing the same artwork in LA, Miami, and New York is like watching television-there are interesting programs, but our viewing location is irrelevant. With that comes a homogenization reinforced by the desire to appeal to the national or global market and a loss of identity that reflects the unique character of place. Place has been one of those cliches of photography practice for as long as the medium has existed, and it has generally distinguished regional practices from broader concerns.

This loss of place is most evident in our exurbs and their aesthetic conformity. Major urban centers, try as they might to mimic each other with a Frank Gehry-designed building or two, are naturally more resistant to homogenization due to their slow-fading old city cores. The most regional areas, that is to say visually distinct areas, are driven less by commerce than by a lack of it. Depressed local economies have preserved local character due to their inability to homogenize. It is these overlooked cities and towns that are the best places to find what makes regionalism interesting-the local taco stands, open-air auto repair joints, surf shops, botanicas, and classic car dealers that are so much a pan of Southern California.

The challenge many photographers face is how to embrace the best aspects of regionalism with an awareness of how their work fits into the historical and aesthetic continuum-which is to say contemporary issues. How does photography express the unique character of geography, populations, and ideas while engaging the larger dialogue of artmaking? Fortunately, Southern California is home to many fine photographers who run the gamut of practices and many excellent institutions that serve to make this place highly individual and yet deeply engaged on the most international level.

Among the thousands of photographers, many do deal specifically with the region of greater Southern California, includingjohn Divola, Robbert Flick, John Humble, Sant Khalsa, and Catherine Opie. All focus their attention on unique aspects of the region without being branded as regionalists. Their work creates a portrait of Southern California that stands among the best photography being made anywhere and fits comfortably in an international context.

Flick is the uber-documentarian of greater LA. His obsessive and complex grids of trajectories across the urban landscape stand as the ultimate portrait of the city. Tens of thousands of images of storefronts and intersections across the city take Ed Ruscha's earlier documentations into the age of streaming video, balancing the artist's coherent vision with the complexity of the exploding urban sprawl. Ruscha's recent exhibition, "Edward Ruscha: Then and Now" (2005), at Gagosian Gallery in New York, mined similar territory, in a less frenetic way, and linked his historical topology of Sunset Strip to the LA of today. In both Flick and Ruscha's exhibitions, the city is laid out, literally, on the walls and tables as specimens, provoking analysis and scrutiny of the usually incomprehensible urban environment.

Two very different views of the desert outside the urban center-one whimsical, the other deadly serious-are the artistic territory of Divola and Khalsa. Divola's recent exhibition (2005) and publication (2004), "Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert," acts as a visual metaphor for the isolation and habitation of that desolate environment. Both lyrical and jarring, the photographs (taken between 1996 and 2001) capture the grace of dogs literally running after his car. Divola's images have the elegance and spontaneity of water-color with the heat and flare of a bonfire, all compressed into large, grainy black-and-white prints that celebrate a love of the desert and the joy of being a free-running hound.

Khalsa has been photographing the ninety-six-mile Santa Ana River in Southern California for the past thirty years, and her photographs delicately balance the encroaching housing developments and man's rutile attempts to tame the river with its overwhelming natural beauty and ferocious power. A dedicated environmentalist, Khalsa's carefully composed imagery fits neatly into the New Topographies tradition in showing the elegant river and the human-made forces that try to tame it. There is a deep sense of foreboding in her photographs, an uneasiness that emanates as much from their beauty as from the signs of futile restraint imposed on it by people. Images of the construction of dams and concrete-encased waterways rising in front of a mountain ridge are indeed poetic, but the freedom of the wild, open spaces that Divola shows us are tempered in Khalsa's imagery by an urgency to capture what remains of that space in the face of constant and unchecked development.

Another interesting comparison to Khalsa's Santa Ana project is the recent exhibition "L.A. River Reborn" at the Skirball Cultural Center. This group show includes Humble, whose images are in direct contrast to Khalsa's. Where Khalsa's images are driven by foreboding, Humble's saturated photographs celebrate urban design, color, and light. While formal and commanding due to their large format, they seem unconcerned with the inevitable loss, primarily due to the fact that they are in the well-established city, not the developing inland. Both speak to our desire to control the rivers, though one presents it as futile and the other as an accomplishment.

If there could be one perfect photographer for Southern California, it would be Opie. Her summer 2006 retrospective at the Orange County Museum of Art demonstrates her wide-ranging interests in people, places, and culture as well as her refusai to be stuck in a signature style or subject matter. Her large, color portraits of surfera, for all their bluntness and hyperbole, are gende and heartfelt Her freeway series of panoramic platinum prints is elegant, remembering the Utopian dream that brought forth such an amazing system of roadways and overpasses. In these and numerous diverse bodies of work, Opie is an artist with both feet planted firmly on the ground in seeming awe of her amazing surroundings. [Ed. note: see the forthcoming January/February 2007 issue of Afterimage for a review of Catherine Opie's exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.]

As LA is the center of car culture, Jack Butler's recent series on customized hot rods is an obvious reflection of the region. Butler's love of the machines and of his fellow enthusiasts is evident in his super wide-angle, black-and-white pinhole photographs whose subjects are mythologized through a low vantage point. Heroic and funny, these photographs fuse nostalgia with the greater sense that making something with your own hands really means something.

Photographic collectives are difficult to manage and even more difficult to maintain; however, the Legacy Project, founded by Jerry Burchneld, Mark Chamberlain, Jacques Gamier, Robert Johnson, Doug McCulloh, and clayton Spada, documents the former El Toro Marine Corps Air Station as it is transformed into a huge municipal park. This ambitious undertaking brings together their shared interests in photography, land use, the environment, and social activism to represent two important aspects of photography in Southern California-environmentalism and cooperation. These artists have been able to gain access and then work together, balancing egos and aesthetics, along with student photographers-a testament to their own commitment to documentation via personal vision.

LA is not particularly known for its photojournalism, but the Las Angeles Times has a roster of excellent staff photographers, none more so than Carolyn Cole who is in every hot spot around the world when it is most brutal and dangerous. Cole nonetheless produces remarkable images of great compassion and artistic brilliance at considerable personal risk. Freelance photojournalist Marissa Roth, who regularly contributes to the Mew York Tana and other publications, has been working on a personal project, "One Person Crying: Women and War," a long-term, global look at war from a woman's point of view and its impact, both directly and indirectly, on families. Composed in a traditional style that combines reportage and personal imagery, Roth's images are deeply affecting for what they show and how they show it.

Colleges and universities have a large presence in Southern California and their instructors influence each generation of photographers. Southern California is considered a breeding ground for conceptual, experimental, performance, and installation art as well as photography. The roster of teachers in Southern California who are practicing artists is impressive: Uta Barth, Butler, Eileen Cowin, Divola, Flick, Khalsa, Opie, and James Welling, to name a few. These artists have the daunting responsibility, as all teachers do, to educate their students in contemporary art. The region boasts a large and vibrant gallery system that directly benefits from it. Though the galleries are spread out over a fifty-mile radius, there are concentrated an centers in Santa Monica, Culver City, and downtown LA, extending all the way out to Riverside. Recent University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) graduate Benjamin Lord's exhibition, "Three Stenographic Projects" (2006), at Hayworth Gallery, is indebted to his interest in theory, photographic history, and how photography has transformed the cultural context of how and what we know. Conversely, another recent UCLA graduate, Juliana Paciulli, utilizes narrative to analyze femininity in pictorial art in her series "The Girl Who Knew Too Much" (2005), at Black Dragon Society. In both cases, the artists' education grounds their practices with a keen awareness of how photographs function, both practically and theoretically, giving the artists a vibrant springboard for their lifelong careers.

One might think that with all the photographic energy, education, and exhibition opportunities, the rest of the international art world would be here too. But there is a lack of consistent, high quality publications in LA; dealers are still complaining that collectors look here and then buy in New York; and the venerable John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation rarely grants support to Southern California artists. Fortunate exceptions have been Flick and this year Szolt Kadar, a mostly unknown photographer. Kadar's fifteen-year series first appears to be a documentary project on a young woman and her child, but he actually uses the two individuals as actors to play out fictions to be openly interpreted by die viewer. While likening himself to William Eggleston, Larry Fink, and Carry Winnogrand, Kadar eschews the documentary label and adopts a free spirit, letting his photographic experience take him wherever it may.

The diverse practices that come out of the region are a sign of its strength, the creative and intellectual fortitude of its artists, and the support of its schools, galleries, and museums. While there cannot be a regionally identifiable style or subject matter, there is a regional attitude that embraces the present and constructs a reality for our use. The few photographers mentioned here embody this ideal and spirit; and while their work would happen regardless of where they live, it certainly would not look the same.

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