Photography

Fahey/Klein - REBELS by Janette Beckman Recap

Julian Lucas
Published 5/9/2022 8:00Am PST

On Thursday night on May 5th, 2022, the 70s, 80s, and 90s Hip Hop, Punk, and fashion enthusiasts alike went down memory lane to celebrate and enjoy the photographic works of British photographer Janette Beckman. Her Exhibition, Rebels, featured at Fahey/Klein Gallery (Los Angeles), took many of us back in time, to the beginning of history in the making. 

Rebels, which encompasses 40 years of photography, provides a magnificent glimpse of Janette's importance in the worlds of art, photojournalism, music, fashion, and popular culture. Janette Beckman has spent decades photographing larger-than-life rebels in music, fashion, and other fields. The impromptu and raw quality of each image is what gives her images their engaging appeal — similar to the spontaneous wildness of 1970s and 1980s subcultures themselves.

Janette Beckman’s work is in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, the Museum of the City of New York, and the Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe.  Beckman’s commercial work includes assignments for clients such as Dior, Kangol, Levi’s, Schott, and Shinola.

Fahey/Klein Gallery
Janette Beckman
Rebels May 5 – June 18, 2022

Hours: 10:00 am to 5:00 pm
Tuesday through Saturday

Phone: (323) 934-2250
Fax: (323) 934-4243
Email: contact@faheykleingallery.com

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"Shooters" Photography Exhibition Opens and Draws Over 300 People

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Text & Snapshots Julian Lucas

“Photography does not sell!” Well, that is an old myth that has lived within this region for far too long. And last weekend the exhibition titled “Shooters” headed by the young Marlon Del Rio known by his Instagram name @the.dirtbag killed that old-tired ass myth.

The exhibition held at the Enterprise Building in San Bernardino consisted of San Bernardino photographers, including photographers from the Pacific Northwest and the east coast. The photographic works on display featured an array of subject matter. From west coast car culture, portraits of beautiful people, images of the mundane, and my favorite subject protest images from the Northwest. “Shooters” drew a crowd of at least 300 or more photography enthusiasts, family, and friends.

Julian Lucas, is fine art photographer, photojournalist, and creative strategist. Julian also works as a housing specialist which, includes linking homeless veterans to housing. Julian has lived in Chicago, Inglewood, Portland, and the suburbs of Los Angeles County including Pomona.

Fahey/Klein Gallery Ernest C. Withers Exhibition Recap

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Text and Event Photography Julian Lucas

It was a night filled with joy as family members and friends gathered at Fahey Klein Gallery to celebrate the lifelong works of the late great photographer Ernest C. Withers. And if you weren’t a part of the family, you were still welcomed with open arms to celebrate and enjoy the beautiful images alongside the family. For me, it brought back that sense of southern hospitality, being originally from Chicago, and, of course, my family being participants of the Great Migration to the north.

Withers not only captured the late 1940s and early 1960s Southern civil rights movement in a way that is relevant today, but he also recorded day-to-day life in the South during this critical era including all those Memphians who introduced Soul, Rock 'n' Roll, and the Blues to popular music. From the blues to baseball to football games and funerals and marches, and everyday and momentous events, Withers was there with his camera. Beale Street's juke clubs and journalistic assignments gave him the confidence and skills to record history as it occurred. It took courage for him to ‘take the shot’ in spite of intimidation by police and other formidable forces during the civil rights era.

“Photography is a collection of memories. One who is trained in photography knows that. Instinctively, people who have an occupation know what they ought to do. You call the fireman to put out the fire; you call the police to solve a police problem; and people who are news people and journalists are collectors and recorders of present evidence, which after a given length of time—days, months, years becomes history.” Ernest C. Withers

Dr. Ernest C. Withers, Sr. (1922 – 2007) a native Memphian, is an internationally acclaimed photojournalist. His photographs have been published extensively in the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Life, Jet, and Ebony. His well-known images comprise an unequaled time capsule of the heartland of Mid-Century America. Withers’s images are in the permanent collection of The Smithsonian and other esteemed institutions.

Fahey Klein Gallery
Ernest C. Withers
I’ll Take You There
June 24 – September 4, 2021

THE FAHEY/KLEIN GALLERY IS LOCATED AT:
148 North La Brea, between 1st Street and Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles, CA 90036

Open to all visitors. Appointments are optional.

Hours: 10:00 am to 5:00 pm
Tuesday through Saturday

Phone: (323) 934-2250
Fax: (323) 934-4243
Email: contact@faheykleingallery.com

Julian Lucas, is fine art photographer, photojournalist, and creative strategist. Julian also works as a housing specialist which, includes linking homeless veterans to housing. Julian has lived in Chicago, Inglewood, Portland, and the suburbs of Los Angeles County including Pomona.

2 Live and Die in L.A. Review & Photo Essay

Reviewed by Julian Lucas

There were so many gallery openings this past weekend throughout the city of Los Angeles and even in the burbs. Usually when we think of exhibitions, we think of the westside or the center of L.A., but curator Frankie Orozco changed that way of thinking this past weekend with 2 Live and Die in L.A. The event was held at the now closed Juvenile Justice Center Court in South Central Los Angeles better known today as Chuco’s Justice Center where the organization Youth Justice Coalition offers a wide range of programs to assist individuals who were once incarcerated, reintegrate back into society. The JJC closed its doors about 8 years ago.

The event was a success 2 Live and Die in L.A. brought out over 2500 people and featured live performances from bands throughout Los Angeles -  Sin the Artists, Tunez 187, Migs Whiskey, Luicidal, Lil sodi, and Bella The Rapper. They played their sets perfectly against a colorful written wall, a perfect backdrop against the silhouette of tall skinny palm trees in the foreground and background. You definitely knew you were in L.A. 

Vendors from all over lined the parking lot including L.A. Originals Taco Truck. if you got hungry, you didn’t have to leave. You could continue to kick back, enjoy the surroundings, eat tacos and get punch-drunk from drinking bottles of Jarritos all day and night.

Successfully strategic - the location fit Orozco’s vision. The works of over 40 Los Angeles photographers were intelligently and uniquely displayed, covering the hallways, rooms, along with the cinder-block walls of small rooms with large windows including a stall-less toilet revealing characteristics of a holding tank. To many of us remembered what it was like to be within the confines of those thick brick walls waiting for punishment.

The photographic imagery that covered the walls were nostalgic for most of us who grew up in Southern California. The work included individuals who struggled with homelessness and addiction, humanizing portraits of those whose reality was survival, just doing what they knew best to do so. Other works were drenched with bright, candy-colored lowriders, a trademark of Los Angeles, the city where lowriding was born.

What is most powerful and important about the 2 Live and Die in L.A. opening is that artists, who may have been caught up in the system at some point, changed the narrative by recharging a facility that was once used to penalize people.

Review: Zhang Mengjiao Examines Beauty and Environmental Habitats

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Text and Photography Julian Lucas

Photography is often about the process. In her current exhibition, For the Sake of… the Artifice! Chinese artist Zhang Mengjiao expressed just that. The exhibition, curated by Yiwei Lu on display at the Kylin Gallery in Beverly Hills, includes two of Zhang's latest photography series, Flat Power, and We Don’t Speak the Same Language.

In her body of work entitled, Flat Power, Zhang successfully presents an in-depth probe of beauty among Chinese women and its permutations within Chinese social media. Her still images present a surreal movement as if within a performance art piece, but the work also activates the same senses as when one stares at and grasps every detail of a sculpture.


In We Don’t Speak the Same Language, Zhang explores and challenges what we think of as “man-made,” by revisiting the zoo but not having the same feelings as she did when visiting the zoo as a young child. Her work gives detailed attention to the mundane, artificial landscapes, while juxtaposing them against natural landscapes and such man-made artifacts as power lines and wallpaper pasted on the walls and doors of the animal exhibits.

For the Sake of…the Artifice! is on display at the Kylin Gallery and runs through July 3rd.
Visit the Kylin Gallery by appointment
8634 Wilshire Blvd,
Beverly Hills, CA 90211

Recap: On Becoming, an Exhibition Presented by Proud Asian Women on View at Avenue 50 Studio

Introduction & Photos Julian Lucas

The Exhibition “On Becoming”, presented by Proud Asian Women+ explores prejudices and discrimination and increased violence towards Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, especially women. Through multidisciplinary artistic focus, each artist draws in the viewer to challenge and provide an alternative way we see. The included exhibition consisted of, photographic studies, sculpture-textile, mixed media, poetry. The exhibit is on view at Avenue 50 Studio in Highland Park. On Becoming runs through June 12th, 2021.

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ABOUT
“All this time I told myself we were born from war—but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty. Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence—but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.” Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Proud Asian Women+ is honored to present “On Becoming” a multidisciplinary group show exploring the radical acts of simply being seen and becoming free.

A longstanding history of xenophobia in America has kept the voices of Americans from the Asian and Pacific Islander diaspora pushed to the margins. Racist tropes and narrow representation have shaped the American consciousness and the psyches of Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) women. The hateful and scapegoating rhetoric of the past four years under the Trump administration stoked a 150% increase in hate crimes against Asian-Americans, which led up to the racially motivated mass murder of six Asian women by a white supremacist on March 16, 2021. AAPI women have one of the highest depression and suicide rates of all racial ethnic groups in the US and yet are 3x less likey to seek help than white Americans. Despite this lack of representation, Americans from the Asian and Pacific Islander diaspora have continued to break through harmful stereotypes and defy old assumptions of agency.

“On Becoming ” is a 4-week exhibition coinciding with Mental Health Awareness Month, Asian-American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, and LGBTQ Pride Month. We asked artists to examine our occupation of liminal spaces, in which we are invisibilized or subject to the white gaze or male gaze, and what it means to become free – mentally, physically, and spiritually. The show challenges viewers to see us in all of our complexity and stand in solidarity with us until we all get free…together..

Proud Asian Women+ is a community-based collective that supports Asian-American creative expression as forms of radical healing, advocacy, and joy.

Julian Lucas, is fine art photographer, photojournalist, and creative strategist. Julian also works as a housing specialist which, includes linking homeless veterans to housing. Julian has lived in Chicago, Inglewood, Portland, and the suburbs of Los Angeles County including Pomona.