Somehow, August is almost halfway through. My kids are going back to school this week (how is that possible), and I am getting more and more signs that our seasonal adventures are about to calm down – from back-to-school announcements to fall exhibition openings, live shows and events. So before we get to that point where the AC stops working 24/7, I rounded up the three essays you read the most on Bytesize this summer. To ease the heat, I also opened them up to all readers, so you can dive back in again.
In July, I wrote about how the financial system that drives the art world obscures the definition of success. Coupled with another key driver of the system—FOMO—which had become the dominant language of marketing on social media, accomplished artists are left to feel that they are constantly not doing enough or not doing the right thing. If they have a career outside the studio that helps sustain their work, the feeling that everyone else is doing it better than them might be exacerbated. Sounds familiar? In this essay, I also suggested that it doesn’t have to be this way: the anxiety-ridden operational mode that became the engine of an elusive success can be redefined.
Analog’s revival feels very present in the photographic world, but it stretches across a number of cultural domains. Gen Zers are buying VHS, writing letters, and spending structured time outside of social while occupying all available slots in the community darkroom.
As I suggested, this move goes beyond any depoliticized nostalgia—it’s hard to yearn for an analog world you never knew. If anything, it’s postalgic, a deliberate and conscious insistence on a relationship with past technology and media as a rejection of algorithmic feeds and the alienation of social media.
Our first ever AnalogCon at LACP in April 2026 (coming back April 10, 11, 2027!) showed how analog photography – as a practice, ritual and community – is flourishing. Young people are searching for third places, authenticity and human connection beyond the fallacies of social media.
Photo credit: Josie V, LACP
Earlier this summer, I shared with you an open call for an exhibition I curated at LACP, which focuses on documentary photography as America was marking its 250th anniversary. The idea was to identify whether this first quarter-century of photographic production has characteristics shaped by larger societal, technological and geopolitical shifts.
This open call birthed a virtual exhibition, and I invited the winners to participate in a curated show at LACP, which explores the impact of shifting technologies on how we capture key moments in culture and civic life, and how documentary perspectives were shaped by larger societal, technological and geopolitical shifts of the first quarter of the twenty-first century.
This project offers a modest and earnest attempt to consider how America sees itself, what it highlights and what might be missing from the frame, beginning with the turn of the century and 9/11, exploring protests, conditions of living, and the aftermath of wildfires.
In Part II, I shared dispatches from the opening, thinking further about photography and mutual responsibility, and how cameras can still take viewers to where they cannot go. Read it here.
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.