Amanda and PDN 

Our full-time faculty Amanda Rowan has won the prestigious PDN Curator Award. This is a biennial award given to five photographers for exceptional fine art images. Rowan received this year’s recognition for her photo project Ritual. This series examines the intersection of seduction, mysticism, and performance within the realm of modern reproductive politics and traditional mating rituals.

Rowan attended the opening and week-long group show in New York City this past month. Photo District News produced the event, led by Holly Hughes. The group show was curated by:

Brent Beamon, Director of Flowers Gallery – NYC
Coco Conry, Gallery Director of Jackson Fine Art
Pauline Vermare, Cultural Director of Magnum Photos New York

The images from the winning photographers was published in October’s issue of PDN, focusing on fine art photography. 

FAYN exhibition 

FAYN’s latest iteration The Unseen Body arrived in September. We had a great turnout celebrating the launch of Issue #006! We exhibited the work in our Photo Arts Gallery, Los Angeles, and gave free copies of the magazine to all attendees. 

The Unseen Body was inspired by the need for diversity in the representation of the human body in mainstream media. We hope to prompt deep discussions about how, as global imagemakers, we use our medium to make images of meaning. Our bodies carry us from our first day to our last. They are the holders of our stories; every blemish, scar, and mark is a part of us. Our bodies are inherently and uniquely our own and cannot be duplicated. And yet daily we are bombarded with images that tell us otherwise.

Magazines available for sale HERE. 

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Lane Barden – The Elevated Eye: Aerial Photography Past and Present

Lane Barden’s current exhibition at the Forest Lawn Museum examines the history of aerial photography, from its origins in the nineteenth century to the boundary-pushing technologies of the 21st century. It assembles nearly 150 images and 14 minutes of video, as well as satellite models and drones. 

The exhibition includes photographs from Forest Lawn Museum’s permanent collection that have never been displayed, as well as works from the Getty Research Institute; Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens; and the Special Collections of Los Angeles Public Library. The Elevated Eye: Aerial Photography Past and Present also features the work of David Maisel, a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow in the Creative Arts and Jenny Odell, a multi-disciplinary artist and writer. The exhibition includes more than twenty images and mesmerizing video footage by the drone pilot and photographer Chen Ming. Moving beyond the stratosphere, The Elevated Eye features historical images from NASA as well as the work of Erwan Rivault, a French geographer who uses data from European Space Agency satellites to create stunning images of natural wonders on the Earth’s surface.

The Elevated Eye: Aerial Photography Past and Present will be open to the public from October 10, 2019 – March 8, 2020
Forest Lawn Museum, Forest Lawn-Glendale
1712 S. Glendale Avenue
Glendale, California

Photo LA

This year the Photo Arts Conservatory will exhibiting and putting on educational programming at Photo LA. Photo LA is a collaborative platform that links the international photography community–world-class artists / photographers, galleries, dealers, and publishers. This four-day event takes place January 30 – February 2nd, 2020 at The Historic Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, CA.

In addition to exhibiting student and faculty work, educational panels will be part of the event:

Friday Jan. 31, 1:30 p.m. – 3 p.m.
Artist and Curator: Lane Barden and Getty Curator discuss Lane’s work in the Monumentaily exhibition at the Getty. The curator will also break down how the show was curated. 

Saturday Feb. 1,  4 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.
Social Media Giants: Thoughts and Advice on Instagram
Baz Here (MFA student at PhotoArts) and Alejandro Ibarra (MFA Alumni), both who have strong Instagram followings will discuss their use of Instagram as a platform, how they got their following, and what they see the future of Instagram to be for photography. 

Saturday Feb. 1,  5:30 p.m. – 7 p.m.
Photo Reps: The Inside Scoop
Maren Levinson (RedEye), Jen Jenkins (Giant Artists), and more will be in dialogue about the current trends in photography and the role reps are taking as things change within the industry. 

We will be exhibiting work from students, alumni and faculty. Here are some highlights from our curation:

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Service Learning: Pet Shoot 

On December 2, our first-semester Lighting I students will be visiting the South LA pet shelter to photograph dogs and cats animals in need of a home. As part of our service and learning engaged curriculum, we are asking the students to evaluate three areas of service learning as they participate in this photoshoot and event: 

Perspective Taking: the ability to engage and learn from perspectives and experiences different from one’s own and to understand how one’s place in the world both informs and limits one’s knowledge. 

Social Responsibility: the ability to recognize one’s responsibilities to society–locally, nationally, and globally–and to develop a perspective on ethical and power relations both across the globe and within individual societies.

Cultural Diversity: the ability to recognize the origins and influences of one’s own cultural heritage along with its limitations in providing all that one needs to know in the world. The students will submit final images that they shoot and a 1.5 page reflection paper in response to their experience. 

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Darkroom Class

The black-and-white film photography class at NYFA is headed by Andrew Hall and has the darkroom at its heart. Offering hands-on experience of the art and craft of photography, this is our orange-lit haven in today’s storm of digital and manipulated imagery. 

Getting back to the DNA of photography, students are introduced to the liberating process of creating their own images from scratch. This begins with processing their own films, then editing from contact prints, right through to creating beautifully crafted black-and-white prints, with a rich tonal range that remain unchallenged in their immediacy. The physicality of the entire endeavor enriches the photographers’ ability to communicate with their audience, and grants them ownership of the work in a unique way, when they have brought their whole project to life by their own skill, diligence and judgment. 

The darkroom may be a Victorian creation, but thanks to the continued commitment of NYFA students and faculty, its creative relevance continues to evolve. 

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Sony Event 

This year NYFA was selected to be invited to Sony’s EDU Class of 2019 Immersion Event in Los Angeles September 27-29, 2019. This is an annual workshop bringing together creators from the EDU community. Students and faculty expressed their creativity while learning from experienced coaches, along with the chance to win some great prizes! After the workshop, on October 3rd, there was an exhibition where students submitted work to be shown on display.

Sony’s EDU Team and Artisans of Imagery lead a fabulous workshop for NYFA Photo students with Nino Rakichevich – Fashion Photography, Katrin Eismann – Street Photography, and 

Brooke Shaden – Fine Art: Your Unique Style. They also held workshops in video with Eyenamics – Telling a Story, and Jeff Berlin – FS Series on Set.

All attendees received a swag bag and had a chance to win a Sony Alpha camera with lens.

If you want to be involved next time or have questions, please reach out to Sony directly at [email protected] or (858)942-0099

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Alumni News

Our BFA Alumni Lotta Lementti was featured in a cover story for Float Magazine for her contemporary Still Life Images. “With the series The Ordinary, I want the viewer to share my sense of wonder and joy in the ordinary objects of everyday life. I want to give the audience a moment to appreciate the things we so often take for granted and overlook.” 

Our Current BFA student Eric James Cabral is working on a personal project documenting iconic rap and hip hop artists, including Big Boi from Outkast and Ice Cube.

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Graphic Design and Social Movements Class

Our Graphic Design and Social Movements class covered the history of the relationship between print, design, and social justice movements. In addition to this, students were also introduced to the digital and analog skills required to develop a graphic design practice that responds to a social issue. Topics we covered included: the abolitionist press, suffragist press, early environmental and labor movement press, various printmaking collectives, anti-war media, agit-prop, street art as intervention, and aspects of social media’s potential for advocacy projects. 

We explored a variety of US and international graphic design styles, uses, and purposes as they relate to specific moments in various struggles for social justice. We surveyed these technological and stylistic specifics and the impacts design has played in launching, growing, and spreading these transformative moments through the social fabric. At the heart of the class was the necessary intersectionality of contemporary social movements that link racial capitalism, gender oppression, ableism, homo- and transphobia, and ecological devastation with each other. 

Through this lens we looked back at the politics and movements of the past century (and a few examples of further in the past) to examine how movement graphics, presses, and arts collectives have built an inspiring constellation of liberatory determination for designers and activists of today to draw on. Students engaged with this history and potential by planning, designing, and printing their own publications that related to an issue or concern of their choice. 

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Sneak Peek to the new FAYN, which is now a class:

We are currently in production on our latest issue of FAYN, Gender and Sexuality.

We are privileged to publish FAYN in LA and be within an academic environment that encourages diversity of thought and expression. Despite this, we as a society are still systematically plagued by gender-based discrimination and sexual oppression. For this next issue of FAYN we will focus on imagery and content that examines your beliefs, constraints, and ideas of gender and sexuality.

We sought work that examines desire and the free expression of all genders and sexualities towards liberatory futures that free heteronormative patriarchal constructions that we have been conditioned to adhere to. 

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Now Casting: Actors and Models