The YOU ARE HERE street photography exhibition is an experiment in which 30+ street photographers from LA were given 10 days to shoot in one square block in the Downtown LA Fashion District. The opening night featured 3 of the best shots of each street photographer, and Jordan Dunn won the best-of-show award and a Leica VLUX-30 camera, which was sponsored by Leica Camera.
The closing event for the YOU ARE HERE street photography exhibition will be this Saturday Oct. 29th at 7 pm at the ThinkTank Gallery (939 Maple Ave). Alex JD Smith, one of the featured photographers for the event, was interviewed by Jacob Patterson from the ThinkTank Gallery, about the street photography exhibition.
“How did you get involved with YOU ARE HERE, and how was your experience shooting through these 10 days?”
Initial contact came via Eric Kim. Neema Sadhegi was looking for LA-based photographers with some established work, who could function as ‘featured photographers’ for the show. Eric suggested me, as well as my friends Jared Iorio and Ludmilla Morais, and we all felt it was an interesting idea.
The experience was definitely positive overall. Working within such tight constraints, both in terms of location and time, made it challenging for sure, but I enjoyed the process of trying to make coherent work within those constraints. Street photography is normally much more open-ended, so the limitations of the project created some unusual situations. For instance, the constant repetition of environment, and even of people, helped me develop a weird rhythm when shooting in that one-block radius. I began to fall into sync with the changing of traffic signals and the flow of people in and out of stores, and this increasing familiarity with the place allowed me to better predict the movement and points of interest among the crowds. This is something that I would not normally experience when shooting, as I tend to walk from point A to point B, rather than in such a repetitive manner. It gave me a lot to think about.
I also really enjoyed getting to know some of the locals. They were initially very suspicious when a constant stream of photographers suddenly showed up in their neighbourhood. However, I talked to a lot of them, and explained the concept and intentions of the show, and they were very cool about it, for the most part. Many showed a great deal of interest in the project, and seemed appreciative that someone was documenting a place they feel proud of. I handed out a lot of flyers, that’s for sure.
“When you go out to shoot photographs in a busy city like Los Angeles, to what kinds of things do you find yourself attracted, and do you go out looking for anything in particular?”
It really depends; if I’m shooting the kinds of street work I’m showing in. For You Are Here, I’m simply reacting photographically to the places I find myself in day-to-day. That kind of work is permanently ongoing, and is more a document of the times, and of the people I meet, the places I go, that sort of thing. However, most of my shooting time these days is taken up with longer-term projects that would probably be best described as social landscape work, and which are much slower-paced; they develop over months, even years, and I revisit areas many times to build a body of work. These projects are driven by a specific idea, or at least are about me exploring some vague notion I have about the intersection of people and place, or a particular societal issue or experience. The most recent of these, ‘When All Is Said And Done’, is now in the editing stage, and a selection of shots from that project can be seen on my website (www.alexjdsmith.com)
“What have you been shooting lately, and what types of topics have you seen rising out of your work as of late?”
Now that I’m starting to wrap up both ‘When All Is Said And Done’ and my ‘Empty Messages’ project, I’m starting the initial exploratory work for a new longer-term project, which focuses on a specific area of LA – although one much larger than the one-block radius of ‘You Are Here’. It’s an area which has fascinated me for some time, and which has enough scope to allow me to play around with the kinds of aesthetic and conceptual ideas I’m interested in, but I’m trying to resist the urge to talk about it too much at this stage. It’s becoming an experiment in online restraint for me, as I want to shoot and develop a project without relying too much on the constant show-and-tell of social media and the online photography world. This is something that has been playing on my mind for some time; the feeling that you need to constantly put work out online in order to be a part of something, but I get the sense that it doesn’t always make for the best work. The title of my blog, ‘Feeding the Beast’, is a nod to my love/hate relationship with that world, and this new project will be a chance for me to hopefully find a happy balance between maintaining an online presence and allowing the work to percolate and give up its answers to me in its own time.
“Anything audiences should be excited about with an exhibition premise like that of YOU ARE HERE? What is different about this show than the other ones you have seen or been involved in?”
For me, the key thing about this show is the nature of the limitations placed on the participants. Seeing the diversity of work that can be produced within such tight constraints says a great deal about photography as a means of independent expression, and gives a clue to the reasons for its ongoing ability to engage both artists and viewers.
“Were there any photos that you are not using in the show that you would care to share? Or cool stories from your shoot?”
I have a number of photos that I really like which didn’t make the cut, for one reason or another. There is one in particular that I’d like to share, of a lady who works in one of the clothing stores on Santee Street. She and her colleagues were really open and welcoming to me, and spoke eloquently about the spirit and soul of their neighbourhood. It was a conversation that sparked something in my experience there, and everything I shot after that meeting was better because of it. I asked if I could take her photograph, and she eventually agreed, posing in the doorway of her store. Despite her initial reticence, her engagement with the lens is total, and the strength in her pose is very compelling. She looks beautiful, proud and strong. In many ways, it’s my favourite photograph from the project, but it didn’t work in context with the others. I guess that is one of the best things to come from these kinds of experiences; the photographs that end up on the wall are not the only ones that are important, it’s also the ones that are made on the way to that goal, because of what they teach you, where they take you, and whose paths they cross.
The closing event for the YOU ARE HERE street photography exhibition will be this Saturday Oct. 29th at 7 pm at the ThinkTank Gallery (939 Maple Ave). See more of Alex’s work here.