Lenscratch: The First Twenty Years

The beloved on-line platform Lenscratch is marking its twentieth anniversary, and LACP is celebrating this milestone with a bunch exhibition that depicts choose winners of the Lenscratch Student Prize. Their works might be joined by the 2026 winner of the Aline Smithson Next Generation Award, which honors female-identified, LA-based rising visible storytellers.

Since it was launched in 2006 by artist and educator Aline Smithson as a private weblog, Lenscratch posted day by day about hundreds of photographers and their ecosystem. From assets about publishers, grants or establishments to in-depth conversations and options that depict photographers from internationally, Lenscratch is a focus of the worldwide photographic neighborhood and a vibrant discussion board with a world attain.

In its first twenty years of exercise, photographers and writers from internationally joined Smithson to maintain and drive ahead this labor of affection, and grew the platform as an equitable, clear and supportive area for visible storytellers and their neighborhood.

Reflecting on these histories and Lenscratch’s path towards the longer term, this exhibition delves into the platform’s intensive archive and returns to voices who had been launched to the photographic world on Lenscratch. In doing so, the exhibition celebrates practitioners and the experiences that inform their views at a second when human relationships with machines of imaginative and prescient and capturing appear notably fraught, and networks of friends really feel extra wanted than ever.