On August 16th I drove up to Santa Monica to meet up with Alex Turner who was giving a talk at Marshall Gallery about his current exhibition there. I had called one of my favorite LA photographer friends, Ave Pildas , on the way up to see if he wanted to join me. Ave, who lives in Santa Monica, couldn’t make the lecture, but said he would be home later if I could stop by after, which I did.
We were catching up in his studio space and during the conversation I told Ave that I really wanted to add one of his prints to my collection and I specifically asked about his photograph of three Long Beach PD color guard officers. He was happy that I wanted a print and agreed to make this print below for me.
I first learned about Ave’s work seven years during a visit to Arcana Books. I saw his self-published book Street / People on a feature rack, and I immediately related to his photographs. I especially liked the image above of the color guard officers. I bought the books and finally met Ave when Arcana held a book signing for his book Star Struck which was published by Deadbeat Club. Since then, we have become good friends, so it became a priority for me to get at least one of his prints.
While Ave was getting ready to make my print, I got to go through his working prints for his Liemert Park Portfolio. It was exciting getting to see so many different images from this portfolio because I remember him telling be in October of 2023 he was thinking about starting to photograph there. At the time we were together photographing in the Eagle Rock area, and we were talking about other areas of Los Angeles that would be good to document. He checked it out the following week and he has been photographing there regularly since and has really come to know that community. The work is solid and important because it documents an important neighborhood in Los Angeles’s history. I hope the right people discover this portfolio and find it several good homes; it has value.
Ave Pildas’s Leimert Park Portfolio
Ave has been documenting Los Angeles for a long time, so it was of little surprise when he proudly told me that the Los Angeles Times was publishing a feature Sunday article the next day built on his 1980 Venice Beach photoshoot of seven of LA’s prominent young architects (Frederick Fisher, Robert Mangurian, Eric Owen Moss, Coy Howard, Craig Hodgetts, Thom Mayne, and Frank Gehry).
Here is a link to the article and photographs of it are below. I am so jealous of how much energy Ave has; he is really focused now on preserving his archive as well as still getting out there to keep photographing.
Finally just a few more photos from Gizmo’s photoshoot that we got in while Ave was printing my photograph.
