Summertime Vintage

It’s summer, let’s play. Inspired by LACP’s location between the Toy District, Little Tokyo and the Arts District in Los Angeles, this call invites submissions for photo-based works that explore vintage and lo-fi aesthetics and technologies from a multitude of perspectives, practices and approaches. You might be shooting with a beloved 1980s Holga, or giving your images a Lomo touch on your computer. Maybe you chronicle the streets of your town with a Polaroid, or you’re capturing playful portraits of people in your community. You might be working with a combination of alternative processes and digital printing, or completely virtual forms of display. We don’t know, but we would love to see them.

As a style and an approach, lo-fi aesthetics rose to prominence in the 1990s. It was embedded in the Gen-X nostalgia for the hues and cultural objects of their 1970s childhood. It was also a rejection of a cultural mainstream that seemed to have preferred conventions over creativity, and was utilizing those as a way to block entry into centers of production. Lo-fi was connected to street culture, to underground music, to an existence that recognizes things might not get any better. And if they don’t, we should probably make the most of what we have and do it with old Kodaks, if we can.

The introduction of digital cameras during the same decade served a harsh blow to the traditional photographic industry. Slowly, it also nourished a turn toward disposable, snapshot or toy cameras that found their way to heart of DIY indie culture. By the 2010, it was hard to find a single Urban Outfitters store without an old camera section.

This exhibition considers such histories, and our relationships with photographic and technological tools, as well as the ways in which they produce new visual languages, concepts and ideas.