American photographer Karen Ballard presents photographs at this year’s Visa pour l’image in a solo exhibition at Maison de la Catalanité from her long-term documentary project on Venice, California.
Venice, CA is a compelling and keen insider’s view of the iconic, quirky, bohemian California coastal town known as an artistic hub and a public beach for all. It’s a place where beauty, surf, wealth, and the harsh realities of today exist side-by-side. Over the last decade Venice has slowly evolved from a storied past to a colorful, complicated, and modern present.
The Los Angeles enclave was founded July 4th, 1905 by conservationist and dreamer Abbot Kinney who won hundreds of acres of coastal marshland south of Santa Monica on a bet. His vision, a ‘Venice of America,’ was to create a cultured resort town, complete with canals and gondolas, and a Coney Island-like amusement park on a pier over the Pacific Ocean. Most of that is gone as the original pier burned down and few of the canals remain. To his credit, Kinney’s dream has long outlived those early years, and millions of people visit Venice Beach every year making it the number one tourist attraction in Southern California after Disneyland.
Over the past decade, the tech boom with its accompanying wealth has led to gentrification. For some that new money has become a plague on the spirit of this gritty beach town where over 40,000 people live. A rapid surge in income inequality, sky-rocketing rent prices, and an oversized unhoused population made worse by the pandemic has flipped Venice on its head.
“I could not have predicted this project, shot over the last decade and a half, would coincide with its ongoing transition,” says Ballard, “the disparity and wealth that now exists in Venice, represents an increasing fact of life in America in the 21st century.”
As Venice continues to evolve, this body of work is a visual study with a nod to its past and a hint to its future.
In the fall of 1994, Ballard made her first trip of many, to Perpignan. She was fresh out of college with several newspaper internships behind her, and a life in photography ahead. Ballard said, “It is my great honor to return exactly thirty years later with a solo exhibition at Visa Pour L’image. I am thrilled!”
David Hume Kennerly
Pulitzer Prize winner
Presidential Scholar,
The University of Arizona
Karen Ballard is an award-winning photojournalist, portrait and movie/television still photographer based in Los Angeles. She has covered major stories at The White House, on Capitol Hill, and has worked around the world, including assignments in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Steven Spielberg, wanting a photographer with Ballard’s journalistic sensibilities, hired her as his unit photographer for Munich. Since then she has shot over 20 feature films, working with among others, Daniel Craig on the James Bond film Quantum of Solace, Tom Cruise on Jack Reacher, and Sylvester Stallone on Rambo and The Expendables. She has recently worked on HBO Max’s Hacks and the Apple TV’s The Morning Show. Ballard’s work is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American History Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). At seventeen Ballard first visited Venice Beach where she made pictures on that eye-opening trip and vowed to return. Twenty-five years later she made Venice her home and embarked on a long-term documentary project about her eclectic American neighborhood.
KAREN BALLARD: VENICE, CA
August 31-Sept 15th
Visa Pour L’Image
Maison de la Catalanité
Pl. Joseph-Sébastien Pons,
66000 Perpignan, France
www.visapourlimage.com
