Evolution of a photo fair.

PHOTO L.A.

SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA

JANUARY 19-22, 2006

Presenting its fifteenth installment this year, photo l,a, has matured into one of the better art photography trade fairs in the United States. Improving on last year's event with its overabundance of conventional or gold chip photography, this year's fair featured more contemporary and diverse work. On opening night, the fair was packed with collectors seeking new discoveries and a large public audience filled the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium for the remaining three days of the fair. The seventy-three exhibitors seemed generally pleased with the response and the business being conducted.

There were countless works to peruse. Current Aperture and Flash Art favorites Lisa Sarfati and Loretta Lux graced the walls of the Yossi Milo (New York) booth. Lux's unusual portraits of children are compelling, but Sarfati's C-prints of young American adults have an overdone, Nan Goldin feel. Sze Tsung Leong's large C-prints continue the popular international investigation into bleak urban landscapes as another well-worn post-modernist theme. Photo-eye (Santa Fe) presented dye coupler prints by Doug Keyes, whose images of artists' books are cagey and art smart. A similar eye candy experience was found at the booth of Charlotte Jackson Fine Art (Santa Fe), which was devoted mostly to Michael Eastman's strikingly large-scale, C-prints of interiors from ruined Cuban villas, as well as his dramatic vistas from his "Vanishing America" series (2005), and his most recent inkjet landscapes.

A number of artists pointed their lenses at action figures, models, or artificially created landscapes and interiors as point of view or subject matter. The use of kitschy, plastic figurines by artists seems to be reaching a crescendo. The Stephen Cohen Gallery (Los Angeles) exhibited artist Tracey Snelling's Convenient (2005), an ingenious tabletop model of a drive-in movie theater. The movie screen is a laptop computer screen playing a program of random images. From G. Gibson Gallery (Seattle), Lori Nix's appealing C-print Paradise (2001) seems to be either a re-photograph of an existing artificial landscape with a waterfall or a shot of a model or poster. Either way, the engaging image works well because of its unrepentant cheesiness.

Represented by Charles Guice Fine Art Photography (Berkeley) is the video Winter in America (2005). This fine work by Hank Willis Thomas and Kambui Olujimi uses action figures left behind by a murdered relative, which brings an unspoken gravitas, taking it beyond the infantile and superficial into a very different realm of experience. Guice also exhibits strong work by Carrie Mae Weems, especially Black Love (Triptych) (2003).

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There were other quirky surprises around the corner from Guice. From Michael Dawson Gallery (Los Angeles), Claudia Kunin's series of anaglyphic prints "Ghost Stories" (2005) require 3-D glasses. In addition to her high-quality photography, her work is utterly charming and funny. Presenting some of the most interesting art in the fair, Lisa Sette Gallery (Scottsdale, Arizona) exhibited the ingeniously unique works of Rick Hards. Small and delicate, his oil on tintypes and his pen and ink on cabinet card miniatures fall into the arena of photo-based mixed media works. Despite their small scale, the pieces succeed as ideas, in contrast to some of the inanely large C-prints littering some of the other galleries. An example is Kim Joon's work at Walsh Gallery (Chicago). Joon's imagery is flashy--depicting three nude models whose bodies are painted in full color and emblazoned with an Adidas logo in one photograph and images from Jimi Hendrix albums in another. The prints have the impact of billboards. Some large-scale imagery does hold its own, such as Lalla Essaydi's at Laurence Miller (New York). Appearing to be influenced by Shirin Neshat, Essaydi's take on Muslim women is beautiful in its austerity. At Paul Kopelkin (Los Angeles), Jill Greenberg's large-scale digital photo print Trillions (Sierra) (2004) is a delightful image of a toddler crying. Jan Kesner (Los Angeles) exhibited John Humble's series "Night Freeways" (2004-2005), another compelling entry in the internationalist urban landscape theme.

While most of the galleries were from the U.S., the Czech Center for Photography presented an interesting collection of black-and-white images from Czech Republic photographers. The Wetterling Gallery of Stockholm had two pieces by Per Huttner, whose project of photographing himself jogging in a white outfit in locales populated by "persons of color" makes an intriguing comment on race and colonialism.

Because photo l.a. is a trade fair for commercial galleries, there was the normal assortment of collectible artist portfolios, Edward S. Curtis photogravures, and the work of A-list photographers with big price tags. Some work pops up as resale items in several galleries. A more rigorous selection of galleries exhibiting would improve photo l.a. Demographically, the audience and the dealers were mainly Caucasian. This situation tends to narrow the field of interest in a worthy event like photo l.a. The population of Los Angeles is 50 percent Latino and the city has a multicultural middle class, but these demographics were noticeably absent. Particularly missing were galleries from Latin America and Asia where important work is being done by new generations of artists. The next step for photo l.a. is to engage a wider audience and constituency, in order to make the event truly world-class.

CLAYTON CAMPBELL is the Los Angeles correspondent for Flash Art magazine and Santa Monica editor for Contemporary magazine.

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