In the event you are not at Sundance this weekend. . . come see still instead of moving imagery at Photo LA, the annual showcase of past and present photographic art, being held at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. The five-day event opened Thursday night with a party that doubled as a fundraiser for Inner City Arts, the non-profit in downtown LA that provides visual and dramatic arts classes to local public schools bereft of art education (shown, left, in photo by Iwan Baan; in photo right, Michael Hodgson, designer of the signage at the Michael Maltzan-designed school). 
Photo LA runs until Monday and will also host panels all weekend; architectural photography is one of several subjects under discussion Sunday, with guests Gordon Baldwin; Barbara Bestor; Ken Breisch; Grant Mudford; Tim Bradley; Edward Cella (Cella, owner of Edward Cella Art+Architecture Gallery, is shown in middle of photo left, with Grant Mudford and Tulsa Kinney, editor of Artillery magazine; she is host of her own panel today, Saturday, “The Anarchy of Imagery: Art, Archives and Post-Photography,” with Colin Westerbeck and Ken Gonzales-Day.)
Themes that might come up at Sunday’s architecture panel, in the words of panelist and photographer Tim Bradley: “What are the implications of encountering architecture through a camera, and then reducing monuments—big and small—down to tonalities on a piece of paper? Can the emotional resonance of a structure be successfully captured or do photographs just make us long for the real thing? Is a successful photograph of a building one that manipulates our longing? And how does the value of that image change if the structure no longer exists, if the fragile piece of paper is all that remains and becomes the only way to “inhabit” the space?”
And while we are on the topic of architecture photography, check this out.
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