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I started drkrm as a small custom photo lab, printing and processing black and white exclusively. But my dream was to curate shows the way I wanted to see them, the way I wanted an exhibition to run. My first show was a client group show, work I had printed for my artist clients. We had a modest turnout, even sold a number of the works, but it was during that show that I succumbed to the gallery curator addiction. Bitten by the bug, as it were. |
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Installation View, Ansel Adams Los Angeles, 2012. Courtesy of drkrm gallery.
I started drkrm as a small custom photo lab, printing and processing black and white exclusively. But my dream was to curate shows the way I wanted to see them, the way I wanted an exhibition to run. My first show was a client group show, work I had printed for my artist clients. We had a modest turnout, even sold a number of the works, but it was during that show that I succumbed to the gallery curator addiction. Bitten by the bug, as it were.
drkrm exhibits fine art photography with a slant toward documentary and photojournalist work, both contemporary and historic. I have featured many emerging artists as well as major photographers. To date, I feel my most important show was the exhibition of predominantly unseen and very rare Ansel Adams photographs, which documented life in Los Angeles in 1940.
I find myself drawn to things that few others seem to appreciate: dark, difficult subjects or a twisted normalcy from more obscure, yet fascinating viewpoints. As a curator, I have never been afraid of taboo issues such as prostitution or queer history. The devastation of the Los Angeles Griffith Park fire sparked a one-year anniversary exhibition featuring images of the destruction of both land and wildlife. In addition, drkrm was one the first commercial galleries in Los Angeles to feature a Cell Phone photography show.
The most recent controversy over Camera Night at The Ivar is, to me, the epitome of achievement. The show, five years in the making, documented the bleak underbelly of the Hollywood Dream Factory; Strippers in the 1980’s photographed by both amateur and professional photographers, including Garry Winogrand. The intent of the show was not so much as to shock as it was to bear witness, not only the exploited women on stage, but the 1,000 yard stare of the patrons witnessing the dancers with silent reverence, the dazed spectators gazing into their personal heaven, or their abyss. It was a complicated landscape of emotions.
I love giving exposure to artists who traditionally would not be displayed in a gallery, or more obscure work from established photographers that, perhaps, is under appreciated or ignored. From Anthony Friedkin’s early study of the surf culture in Southern Californi, the controversial portraits of the developmentally disabled with Ryan Herz’s The Children of Edgewood, to the shockingly honest Lowlife: Scot Sothern’s brutal, yet beautiful series of images of street prostitutes. I try to push the edges of what we’ve known and seen before, and in the process not only find other veins of significance in these well-known photographers, but also give voices to those less established or connected but no less relevant.
