Last week, from Jan 14th to the 17th, the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, downtown Santa Monica, hosted the XIX Annual Photo LA. You can peruse the official site here.
Others have written about all of the surrounding events, from seminars on collecting to lectures with star photographers, and portfolio reviews (a few links at the bottom of this post.) As a photographer, I was interested in spotting trends in the market, and and these are my quick impressions from that angle...
Right from the start the event felt smaller. The venue is cozy, lacking the sprawling feel of previous editions... the sense of an industry in crisis was tangible from the beginning. The general sense - and others have picked up the same scent - was one of a more introspective Photo LA: B&W was prevalent, both in contemporary works as well as in classic/vernacular ones, and missing where the walls after walls of the very large color photographs that we have seen in the past as the staple of the event. There were a few exceptions, interestingly many of them from abroad, but most boots were showing smaller prints, classically in feel, classically framed, some of them impersonally classically composed and inspired too.
I for one, was happy to see such a reversal of trend. The end of the ubiquitous monumental color print's age is not one I will decry.
A few other Photo LA 2010 reports and commentaries (more coming soon...)
