How do you make pictures of times long gone by? How do you show a lifetime’s worth of photographs in a small space? How do you talk about them when they are sitting on a virtual wall? Writer/Photographer, longtime L’Oeil correspondent Andy Romanoff faces these questions in The Long View, his installation at Photo L.A. Collect + Connect. To answer them he is showing a series of videos that feature him reading from his stories and memoirs illustrated by hundreds of photos made over the course of sixty-plus years. The stories tell of a life nearing eighty, a lifetime of adventures, downfalls, triumphs, and accomplishments.
The first story, The First Place I Ever Lived in L.A. recounts his leaving Chicago as a teenager, after getting a warning from the police, and driving across the country with two companions.
The Roads You Take… is a story about the 50th reunion of the Hog Farm, a commune he joined in the late sixties and remains connected to even now.
In Living at the Hotel California he talks about the drug-filled eighties. The pictures are carelessly made, poorly preserved frames from that time, reimagined now with the sensations of those years as the guide. It’s a wild ride.
Going Faster tells the story of returning to the Bonneville Salt Flats almost fifty years after first going there to photograph racing cars in 1973 — and the emotion that stirs.
Picturing Kansas is a meditation that explores the two-lane roads and small towns of Kansas and talks of the forces that are driving them to extinction. The pictures, made in 2019, are part of an ongoing project to photograph the places in between, the places we travel through on our way to the places we are going.
15,000 Buddha’s is a contemplative moving image presentation featuring the sacred statues and places of many religions. In it hundreds of pictures made over many years are blended together seeking the essence of the sacred experience.
What a Building Can Teach a Photographer is Aric Allen’s short film about Andy Romanoff’s process as he worked on a project called Seeing the PDC. In it, he talks about doing long, complex projects and their beneficial effects on his patience.
Photo L.A. Collect and Connect is a virtual photo fair running for two days this weekend, June 27th and 28th. Featuring over seventy galleries, panel discussions, and seven installations it aims to replicate the experience of walking the halls of a live event. For more information see: https://www.photola.com/
Andy Romanoff Words: https://medium.com/stories-ive-been-meaning-to-tell-you
Andy Romanoff Pictures: https://andyromanoff.zenfolio.com/
