2024 Annual Awards Exhibition: Celebrating LA’s Visual Storytellers

About

It’s been nearly a decade since LACP began honoring the trailblazers of the photographic world. Much had changed in the world and in LACP’s universe. As the Center continues to grow, it has become home for visual storytellers, designed to amplify powerful voices that might otherwise remain unheard.

LACP’s Annual Awards Ceremony reflects those commitments and celebrates the first anniversary of the Center in DTLA. This year’s honorees have transformed photographic practice and uplifted emerging artists and underserved communities.

Harry Gamboa Jr., the Stieglitz Award winner, has a key role in shaping—and claiming space for—contemporary Chicano culture, starting with the East Los Angeles collective Asco (disgust, or nausea in Spanish) between 1972-1987. Bridging peoples, performance, personal memories and photography, Gamboa Jr.’s multidisciplinary practice navigates surreal landscapes and political realities, innovative artistic language with shifting identities and experiences.

For the Awards exhibition, Gamboa Jr. revisits the convergence of photography, natural forces, performance and group-based action in his work. For the Present Tense series, he led fellow performers to DTLA, to create action-based portraits near the 6th Street Bridge and on Los Angeles Street, a few blocks from LACP’s headquarters.

In his Untitled mural, Ken Gonzales-Day, the JEDI Award winner (Justice, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion), overlays data and facial recognition software over Aztec figurines and busts, considering how we think about those histories and how were they seen by the colonial approaches that birthed the interest in such technologies. Gonzales-Day’s work stretches beyond the photographic image, to consider how Chicanx and queer bodies were seen (or disregarded) by authorial systems and public discourse. His past projects led him to archives, advocacy work with municipal agencies, public art, facilitating walking tours and curatorial projects.

The Spark Award is given to those who have dedicated their careers to promoting and supporting artists. This year it is awarded to gallerist Tarrah Von Lintel, who has been promoting photo-based artists in her eponymous her gallery since 1993. Working in Paris, Munich and New York, Von Lintel moved to LA over a decade ago, where she continued cultivating a selective roster of artists who push the boundaries of photographic practice and our vision. Von Lintel curated a selection of works from her collection for this exhibition, sharing with LACP her unique perspective.

Eztli De Jesus was nominated for the Emerging Voices Award by Harry Gamboa Jr., who came across her work as she was participating in workshops organized by Las Fotos in Boyle Heights. In her ongoing documentary series, De Jesus captures her surroundings and family, creating a community-based archive of relationships and ways of life that are often excluded from mainstream view.

Also featured here (proudly!) are works by students who participate in LACP’s photography workshops, organized at Inglewood Parks and Recreation Center. Throughout the workshops, students are empowered to discover their personal stories, re-discover their surrounding through a photographic perspective, and share their impressions with their communities.

Features

The 2024 Annual Awards Exhibition will feature:

• The Annual Awards Ceremony, In-Person, Saturday, Oct. 19th, 4 – 6pm at LACP Headquarters. You can purchase tickets HERE.

Price Sheet and Instructions for Purchasing Artwork

Download/view price sheet HERE.

Interested in purchasing artwork? Please email info@lacphoto.org and a representative will contact you ASAP.  Thank you!