Camera Club Los Angeles

A Place for Photography.

Daniel Kukla

In March of 2012, I was awarded an artist’s residency by the United States National Park Service in southern California’s Joshua Tree National Park. While staying in the Park, I spent much of my time visiting the borderlands of the park and the areas where the low Sonoran desert meets the high Mojave desert.  While hiking and driving, I caught glimpses of the border space created by the meeting of distinct ecosystems in juxtaposition, referred to as the Edge Effect in the ecological sciences.  To document this unique confluence of terrains, I hiked out a large mirror and painter’s easel into the wilderness and captured opposing elements within the environment.  Using a single visual plane, this series of images unifies the play of temporal phenomena, contrasts of color and texture, and natural interactions of the environment itself. 

Work by Daniel Kukula. See more here.

Benjy Russell

My work seeks to uncover truths and partial truths of human nature through imagined realities, fictional portraiture, and alleged artifacts. It concentrates mainly on the porous boundaries between fiction and reality, using a hybrid of genres and techniques to disorienting effect.My imagery and sculpture are a study and an exploration of either side of the line that exists between sanity and a more interesting reality.

Working under the assumption that in every lie there is a kernel of truth, the work exists in an “almost” reality that (in execution) takes into question spatial relationships, dimensionality, and magical realism as they apply to gender politics, objectification of archetypes, personification of objects, objects as subjects, science as religion, glorification of symbols, transmogrification, and masculine and feminine definitions/expectations in queer subcultures. My collages and photographs not only play with the notion of subject and background, but go back and forth between tri-dimensional and bi-dimensional space; from the space of imagination to the space of representation. The interplay between medium (and execution) makes an interesting study of the relationship between sculpture and image. Many of my images are of sculptural objects which question the notion of my sculptures as subject as opposed to object. Additionally, many of my figurative images have a sculptural element which lends itself to the notion of a figurative subject as object.

Work by Benjy Russel. See more here.

Brad Farwell

Each year, millions of camera-wielding tourists descend on Rome, confronting monumental works of art and architecture, their images part of a continuum of photographic records of the city extending back to be dawn of the medium. The experience of the tourist mirrors the nature of the photograph; a momentary displacement of space and time, a simplification of one’s surroundings, and a functional isolation from the people and things you are ostensibly trying to connect with. 

Work by Brad Farwell. See more here.

Martin Stranka

My work exists in that space between dreams and waking, those split seconds when a person has a foot in both worlds. Light like the first rays of twilight filtering through a curtain when even the dust seems to glitter with some sort of hidden purpose or meaning. The language of stillness. The solitary sound of your own footsteps echoing down the streets of a deserted city. And on every building the flickering image of a silent film like faded memories. His images. So personal yet somehow universal they seem like your own memories, your own moments. And maybe they are.

Artist of the day Martin Stranka. See more work here.

Maciek Jasik

Photography has flooded our world with images of ourselves. We are accustomed to seeing and assessing images of people constantly, most of whom are celebrities or strangers we will never meet or know. We instantly affix attributes, often based just on the attractiveness of the other gender.

In the 19th century, photography allowed painting to pull away from detail to focus on an emotional response to reality. With ‘Bypassing the Rational,’ I am knowingly retreating from the details which draw and entice us, and which allow us to judge. Seeing every pore, every scar and sag is not a route to intimacy; it is a pretence. Instead, the focus only reaches part of the figure. The rest is a blur in a vibrant, limitless sea of color, a confluence of emotions and feelings. This evokes the traces of memory we have for each other, and the inability we have to ever fully understand each other. This action becomes so pronounced, genders can be difficult to discern; even the basics can’t be taken for granted.

Work by Maciek Jasik. See more here.

Kerry Mansfield

Growing up I was fortunate to spend part of every summer fly fishing, camping and horseback riding in the mountains. Now, as an adult living in major metropolitan city it’s a rare treat for me to escape the incessant hum of white noise and endless concrete. Recently, I found myself in a very dark space but there was one perfect organic place that I could retreat to as a antidote. “Grounded” explores that impulse to escape both physically and mentally from the gray and deafening confines of the city with a camera in tow. As I began to revisit the way in which we inhabit the space at the boundaries of land, sea and sky I kept returning to certain images that felt like a balance between the unease and the peace I felt during the hours I spent at the edge of the ocean. The figures in these compositions represent less the individuals in the pictures but an unexplained attraction to the edges of our environment. We all seem drawn to a seashore, the crest of a tall hill, or even the sky, dangerously out of reach. When I find myself in these places, a sense of my own small place within the environment could easily elicit a sense of fear and unease, yet, inexplicably I find a peace not often found in the places over which I control.

work by Kerry Mansfield. See more here.

Jeremy Sachs-Michaels

When I first graduated from college, I would go to work at 4:30 or 5am. There was something about that kind of moment, that feeling of stillness, of pre-dawn, of being awake before the world. I would sometimes find myself aware of how precious and formative those moments were, and then the moment would pass. 

I would become nostalgic for the present, and that is when the seeds of this project began.

These images were created with the intention of using photography in it’s simplest form; to pause a moment. In a world where we breeze through life at the speed of viral videos and hashtags, these photographs are created in the hopes of extending a sweet millisecond into a lifetime. With each frame I try to acknowledge that even when life is bitter, there is still sweetness deep within.

Work by Jeremy Sachs-Michaels. See more here.

Lolly Koon

These images are part of an on going series in which I photograph experiences in my life.  They are made of trips, moves, moments with friends, and loved ones, that I make as my visual diary.

Though the images are very personal in content, I like to use myself as a subject, some times only as a body part; to convey an idea or a story in the image that can be broader than just a part of my life. I hope the viewer can also find a feeling or a certain nostalgia from my images.

Work by Lolly Koon. See more here.