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
1:00-5:00 PM Saturdays or by appointment.
For more information or to schedule an appointment email us at info@seasons-la.com or visit our instagram.
Artist
Zach Callahan
A catalog for this exhibition is available at Smog Press and in person at the gallery.
Signed edition of 150
8.5 inches x 8.5 inches
Saddle Stitched / Black Staple Bind
32 pages, 14 color & b/w plates
ISBN: 978-1-7369863-8-7
Statement
“Photography for Evans, was neither document nor art, but a kind of a novel; a means to create a literature of images, using facts to construct fictions that revealed truths.” - Lewis Baltz, The Most American Photographer
The title of this show is a take on the seminal jazz album recorded by Oliver Nelson in 1961 for Impulse records titled: The Blues and the Abstract Truth. The subject of these photographs is Los Angeles. The themes and ideas I am interested in—the city itself, class, and the infrastructure or happenings around transportation and cars—have essentially been the same for the last 13 years I have lived and photographed here. However, in recent years there has been a dramatic shift in what it feels like to exist in and photograph Los Angeles. There is more at stake both for people living here and for the photographer making work that concerns the social fabric of the city. The disparity and uneasiness is growing, and there are new threats to people’s lives and livelihood. This may not be true for all people living here, but this is true for the working class neighborhoods and main arteries of the city I am photographing around. This is the raw material I am attempting to shape.
The images in this show were primarily made in two ways. The first is what could be called “documentary” mode, and the second involves scripting scenes for the camera. By nature, photography lives in a space between literature and film in that all three mediums deal with describing or depicting their subjects based on the author’s sensibilities. I instruct these images according to that belief. Some of these staged images were created throughout the city, while others were made using the parking lot of my studio as an outdoor studio itself. These images were created from scenarios I’d witnessed, imagined, or unsuccessfully photographed out in the world. I employ a visual language that is similar enough in both modes of image making so that the question of believability or truthfulness of the photograph becomes unimportant, and the camera’s objective description of the subjects ideally creates a singular vision.
Historically, the words fact and truth have been loaded when used in reference to photography and I am of no illusion that any of these images are or convey the absolute truth—if there is such a thing. My hope is that the sum of these images will somehow transform my subjective decisions into a series of small truths that form a nuanced metaphor about Los Angeles, this country, and my own way of seeing—an abstract truth.
Bio
Zach Callahan (b. 1984 - Gainesville, FL) was raised in Jupiter, Florida. In 2006 he received his BA in English Literature from the University of Central Florida and soon after moved to New York City. He earned his MFA from the University of Hartford's International Low Residency Program in 2017, where he was awarded the merit scholarship. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California where he has held adjunct positions at Cal State Long Beach and ArtCenter Pasadena. His writing as been published in Wax Poetics Magazine and his photography has been commissioned by the New York Times. In August of 2024 he self published his first monograph Exhaust. The work examines class, loneliness and quiet everyday moments on foot in the streets of Los Angeles, a city that is dominated by car. In 2026 his work was acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He is a founding member of Seasons.