Expand and Contract: American Documentary Photography in the 21st Century (Virtual)

About

Winners have been invited to display their work in a curated exhibition at LACP’s gallery in Little Tokyo, in addition to being featured online on the LACP website alongside other selected works.

The third edition of Expand and Contract marks USA’s 250^th anniversary and the second quarter of this century by focusing on American documentary photography today.

Expand and Contract is a series of exhibitions that explore the transformations of contemporary photographic practice, and its meeting points with both conceptual legacies and technological innovations. (See the 2024 edition here and 2025 here). By turning its attention to documentary photography, it suggests that documentary is a highly complex, historically and socially contingent field of vision. The exhibition turns a documentarian lens toward life in America and invites an understanding of the collective through a kaleidoscopic view of the everyday.

It also asks to observe a photographic tradition that prioritizes a connection—between photographers and their subjects, whether those are human or part of the natural world. At this moment, which seems to have been defined by a sense of fragmentation and alienation, documentary seems to carry a critical potential for a needed point of contact.

The Juror

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 book, Pre-State Photographic Archives and the Zionist Movement (Routledge, 2023) 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 exhibition catalogues, magazines, journals and. Her writings about contemporary art, visual culture, technology and image-based media were published in Artforum, Artillery, Photographies, Jewish Currents, Tablet and Forward, among other outlets.

Juror Statement

The histories of documentary photography are entangled with battlefields, struggles for representation, and shifting dynamics of power­—whether in the halls of institutional power, in the street, or in domestic spaces. Documentary photographers highlight societal mechanisms that might otherwise remain invisible by capturing how economic and political shifts redefine both individual lives and the environments in which they unfold. The lens never just captures what it “sees”; it snaps a point of view defined by choices.

So what does it mean to think about documentarian perspectives at the beginning of the second quarter of this century? And what can documentary practices teach us about the American social and geographic landscapes today? When I was looking through the submissions, I was struck by how many images capture a forward motion that also seems to have been frozen, as though participating photographers had tapped into the heart of a nation that pushes against stagnation—protests, parades, social rituals from across the country, people navigating their way toward employment, community, and themselves.

Tim Eastman, the first-place winner, tracked the workampers, who direct their RVs to wherever the next seasonal job awaits. Kelly Fogel placed video cameras in the hands of performers in Vegas and documented housekeepers in Los Angeles in the homes where they work. Evan Williams captured a mural in a bank in Belle Glade, FL that connects idyllic fantasies of the past (that perhaps never existed) with the realities of the present. All winners highlighted the complexities of self-presentation, actualization, and the brute realities of daily life, telling stories of human connection, inspiration, hardships, and hope. As America marks its 250^thanniversary, perhaps the most important gift its citizens can give one another is the willingness to truly see one another in the light of our shared pursuits rather than everything that tears us apart.

Features

Expand and Contract: American Documentary Photography in the 21st Century will feature the following FREE events and happenings:

• Virtual In-Person opening reception, Thursday, July 16, 2026, 12 pm – 1 pm PST on Zoom RSVP 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!

For questions please email info@lacphoto.org