Los Angeles has been filled with art and photography shows the last few weeks. Photo l.a., Classic Photo, a number of smaller art shows and… The LA Art Show. It’s a big show with over 120 galleries from twenty plus countries showing paintings, sculpture and a handful of photographs to 60,000 art enthusiasts. I went to see photographs among the paintings but I ended up looking at cameras instead. That’s because there were literally thousands of cameras and it seemed to me that every one of them was busy making pictures, reviewing pictures or sending their pictures to the world. Agnes Gomes-Koizumi, LA Art’s press person told me, “More than 90,000 pictures used the hashtag #laartshow on Facebook on opening night” 90,000 pictures uploaded to one site! It seems we don’t look at art now so much as digitally memorialize it. I say this knowing full well I do it too – I do it to write these stories. I do it knowing that bringing a camera to an art event distances me from the work even as it offers me the illusion that I’m capturing it.
With so few photographs in the show I decided to concentrate on the way people were interacting with art through their current looking glasses, their cameras. Here’s what the LA Art Show looked like to me.
Andy Romanoff, contact information and website [email protected]
All photos copyright Andy Romanoff except:
Painting – Kameramann Ian Turpen by Rikki Niehaus
X-Ray image of camera – copyright Nick Veasey
