Summertime Vintage
Aug 7, 2025 – Sep 27, 2025
Join us on Thursday August 7th for our inaugural second floor space opening reception for Summertime Vintage!
Top Prize Winners
First Place – Rebecca Hackermann
Second Place – Peggy Reynolds
Third Place – Mica Meyer
Honorable Mentions
Richard Alexander, Federica Armstrong, Annie Briard, Cameron Coley-Smith, Valentino Constantinou, Dora Duan, Robert Gideon, Mark Harmel, Susan Isaacson, Epiphany Knedler, George Krause, James Kuo, Neil Leventhal, Jasmine Lord, James Malsich, Kerry Mansfield, Erika Maru, Catherine Panebianco, michael rababy, Matthew Ragen, Fray Reyes, Sandra Richardson, Noel Roque, Sara Silks, Bing-Chi WU, Carl Young
Juror & Curator
Dr. Rotem Rozental, Los Angeles Center of Photography Executive Director and Chief Curator
Opening Reception
Thursday, August 7th, 2025, 6-8pm, 2025 RSVP HERE
Exhibition Run Dates
August 7th, 2025 – September 27th, 2025
Prize cameras are courtesy of Freestyle.
Open Call
Summertime Vintage will be shown in LACP’s new 2nd floor gallery space.
It’s summer, let’s play. Inspired by LACP’s location between the Toy District, Little Tokyo and the Arts District in Los Angeles, this show invited photographers that explore vintage and lo-fi aesthetics and technologies from a multitude of perspectives, practices and approaches.
As a style and an approach, lo-fi aesthetics rose to prominence in the 1990s. It was embedded in the Gen-X nostalgia for the hues and cultural objects of their 1970s childhood. It was also a rejection of a cultural mainstream that seemed to have preferred conventions over creativity, and was utilizing those as a way to block entry into centers of production. Lo-fi was connected to street culture, to underground music, to an existence that recognizes things might not get any better. And if they don’t, we should probably make the most of what we have and do it with old Kodaks, if we can.
The introduction of digital cameras during the same decade served a harsh blow to the traditional photographic industry. Slowly, it also nourished a turn toward disposable, snapshot or toy cameras that found their way to heart of DIY indie culture. By the 2010s, it was hard to find a single Urban Outfitters store without an old camera section.
This exhibition considers such histories, and our relationships with photographic and technological tools, as well as the ways in which they produce new visual languages, concepts and ideas.
Juror & Curator
Rotem Rozental, Ph.D, is the Executive Director of the Los Angeles Center of Photography. Between 2016-2022, she served as Chief Curator at American Jewish University, where she was also Assistant Dean of the Whizin Center for Continuing Education and Senior Director of Arts and Creative Programming. Her upcoming book, Pre-State Photographic Archives and the Zionist Movement will be released by Routledge Publishers in March 2023, and was named recipient of the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Award by the Association for Jewish Studies.
Rotem is a lecturer at USC Roski School of Art and Design Critical Studies Department. She mentors artists worldwide and contributes regularly to magazines, journals and exhibition catalogues. Her writings about contemporary art and image-based media, as well as Jewish and Israeli art, were published in Artforum.com, Photographies, Jewish Currents, Tablet and Forward, among other outlets.
Features
Summertime Vintage will feature the following FREE events and happenings:
- In-Person opening reception, Thursday, August 7th, 2025, 6-8pm RSVP HERE
Price Sheet and Instructions for Purchasing Artwork
Download/view price sheet TO COME.
Interested in purchasing artwork? Please email info@lacphoto.org and a representative will contact you ASAP. Thank you!