Artist Lecture: Deirdre Lamb

The lecture I attended was in a small studio in downtown Los Angeles. The artist was a woman named Deirdre Lamb who has been a photographer for over twenty-five years. She started talking off about her start in this industry. Her father was a photographer and seeing him take photos and print inspired her to also pursue the art. She worked her way through Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, CA. and moved to Los Angeles after graduating. She looked at the Lookbook, a book of all the Los Angeles photographers and their work and picked out ten photographers whose work she admired and went to them seeking a job. Her first choice, a celebrity photographer named Charles Bush, hired her as an unpaid office assistant where she did small jobs but mainly kept the studio clean and in order. Her hard work and responsibility moved him to hire her doing paid work. She worked for him but eventually opened her own studio on Melrose doing advertising (which she majored in) and celebrity photography. I thought it was especially exciting to hear her talk about the industry and the many people she’d photographed during her time in LA such as Janice Dickenson (who she said was even crazier back then) and Pierce Brosnan (who she said had eyes even bluer than the looked in the movies). In addition, she had some interesting stories about Los Angeles and Hollywood and the way it was in the 80’s. When her first daughter was born, she decided to move up to northern California to raise her away from the city and the smog. Naturally, outside of the city, the demand for advertising and celebrity photography was little to none and she had to adapt to the new environment, taking up wedding photography and portraiture. I thought it was interesting to hear about the limitations of a certain field by the place you live and it made me think of my major and having a desire for versatility no matter my location. In addition, she is one of the few photographers that prefers and specializes in black and white photography and she talked about the importance of this tradition as hand-printed b&w photography lasts hundreds of years (as long as the paper lasts) while digital can fade in the month after just a few years. Also, because the evolution of digital technology, many digital images will be lost when we graduate to the next form beyond cd disk or whatever we choose to store our photos on. I loved the full range of contrast and depth the traditional printing created in her photos and she seemed to have a gift for capturing people in a truly beautiful, no matter their appearance or even age. She had one show that she had some photos from that consisted of portraits of young children, ages 2-8. The depth and maturity that the children seemed to possess was truly amazing and awe-inspiring, if their ages had not been listed on the titles I would have had no idea her subjects were so young.