Brand Library & Art Center, Glendale Library, Arts & Culture and the Los Angeles Center of Photography (LACP) present “If Memory Serves: Photography, Recollections and Vision.” Curated by LACP Executive Director Rotem Rozental, Ph.D, “If Memory Serves” features artworks by Aurora Wilder Collective (Jennifer Pritchard in collaboration with Patrick Corrigan and DALL-E), Elizabeth Bailey, Annette LeMay Burke, Dena Elisabeth Eber, Sarah Hadley, Diane Hemingway, Rohina Hoffman, Susan Lapides, Annie Omens, Lori Ordover, Rosalie Rosenthal, Safi Alia Shabaik and Aline Smithson.

Our hard drives may fail. Our phones might break. We may forget an image that was once cemented in our minds. Our relationships with the images and devices that hold our memories define how we understand our position in the world. “If Memory Serves” emerges from the moments those devices fail us, our recollections betray us, and our pictures refuse to bring back the people they once captured. This exhibition emerges from the intersection of our haunting pasts, possible futures and our connections to photographic images, technologies and the systems that ask to speak for our photographs. 

These projects are defined by the viewpoint and lived experiences of their creators: female-identified, immigrants, descendants of inherited traumas, caregivers, providers. Photography is key to efforts to claim visibility, capture narratives and elicit conversations about the lives of vulnerable bodies and communities. The exhibition begins with and honors Aline Smithson, a mentor, photographer and educator, whose work with artists is redefining photographic practice. This exhibition celebrates her immense contribution to photography and further comments upon the reach of her stewardship and pedagogy. The participating artists have all been studying with and from her. Seen together, their works offer profound insight into our co-existence with photography, suggesting meeting points between personal experiences and broader societal issues and conflicts – from privacy to grief, from representation to immigration.

“If Memory Serves” will be on view through Feb. 24 at the Brand Library & Art Center, 1601 W. Mountain St. in Glendale.