SEASONS
Seasons is an artist-run contemporary photography gallery started in 2024 in Los Angeles, California. We are currently located in Chinatown at 422 Ord St (2nd Floor) along with our friends The Fulcrum Press, Gene’s Dispensary, and Leroy’s Happy Place.
Gallery Hours
12:00-5:00 PM Saturdays or by appointment.
For more information or to schedule an appointment email us at info@seasons-la.com or visit our instagram.
2026 Upcoming Exhibitions
Artist
Peter Baker
Statement
Toward a Hyperreality is a body of work about urban space, its consequences, and the shifting identity of the contemporary American city. For the past decade, I have been photographing the proclaimed city centers of downtown Los Angeles and Paradise, Nevada—better known as the Las Vegas Strip—and what I see as the socio-spatial schism of the built environment. The work is an interplay between reality and fiction, posing questions about progress, technology, consumerism, socio-economic disparities, and the human dramas that unfold in the contemporary social landscape. The title Toward a Hyperreality is meant to echo Toward A Social Landscape, a seminal 1960’s photography exhibition and book which, along with New Documents, sought to reframe a kind of documentary style. The history of twentieth-century photography is rich with images portraying the streets of American cities as a public stage, suggesting authenticity and capturing spontaneous human gestures in the flow of daily life. By the 1980s and ‘90s, many artists aimed to subvert those notions by intervening or consciously staging their pictures to various degrees. As a student of the medium, all of these movements have greatly informed my work. But as a photographer of the twenty-first century, my work doesn’t aim merely to question the street as a democratic social space—it describes a landscape increasingly constructed to create the illusion of a shared reality, while perpetuating the erasure of the public realm. In this sense, today’s social landscape invites us to enter an image where we perform our public selves, while our experiences are mediated all around us.
A common misconception about the theory of hyperreality is that it applies to conspicuously artificial places like Disneyland. We imagine that once we exit the spectacle, or put our devices back into our pockets, we re-enter the “real” world. But my practice stems from a feeling that the duplicity of the social landscape is hiding in plain sight— that architecture and facades act as emblems of power and ideology— concealing labor, history, and even violence. In my photographs hyperreality resembles a more subtle, poetic condition— where facts clearly described come under suspicion, qualities of light shape an unsettling beauty, and unfamiliar zones come to pass for the norm.
Bio
Born in 1981, Peter Baker is a photographer from The Bronx, New York, focussed on the contemporary urban landscape. He received a BA in Literature & Photography from SUNY Purchase in 2005, and an MFA from the Yale University School of Art in 2012. He has designed and taught courses at the International Center of Photography in New York and has been a contributing writer for American Suburb X and Der Greif. He has published a book of his work with Kris Graves Projects & his commissioned work has been published in The New York Times & Architectural Digest. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles and is a founding member of Seasons LA.