Intro Bio
Dr. Rotem Rozental is a photo-historian, curator and writer who serves as the Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Los Angeles Center of Photography (LACP). Trained as a scholar and researcher, she came into photography not through making images, but by thinking about what they do, who they function, and how they impact viewers—socially, culturally, and technologically. Her work moves between curating, writing, and academia, and it is shaped by an ongoing interest in how images function within larger systems and how they shape the way we see ourselves and each other. You can follow her on Substack here: https://rotroz.substack.com/
You said you’re not a photographer – but you’ve spent your life inside photography. Where did that begin?
I came into the contemporary art world at a pivotal moment: the rise of digital cameras, editing software, and then social media.
My fascination with those developments and their impact on art and audiences was
profound, and I could see how it changes culture–from the underground to the mainstream.
It was then that VJs became as important as the DJs, and when the club scene found its way to the centers of cultural production.
I was hooked. It led me to organize video art events with my collaborator, Gaby Ron, in underground spaces and clubs in Tel Aviv. You’d go to a party, and suddenly everything would stop, and a video program would take over the space.
I was drawn to technology-based media because that was the quintessential medium of the moment. The digital manifestations of still and moving images – and the way they entered both popular and underground culture – changed everything, from aesthetics to how we understand one another.
I never approached images as a practitioner. I approached them as someone who supports artists, and then through research. At some point I realized I was really drawn to thinking about what photographic images, especially on social media, were doing to communication itself.
That also connected to a broader moment: the introduction of Google Street View and Google Maps led artists to appropriate images from online databases, to translate avantgarde techniques to the digital age. There was this convergence of photography, technology, and culture that made it clear this is the field you need to look at if you want to understand how technology changes everything and how life would look and feel like in the future, and how we will capture those stories.
It feels like photographers point at the world – and you point back at them.
I do watch the viewer. But I also watch the audiences, the system, and the technology.
That perspective allows me to see how images are already systems and databases, how they are elements within larger frameworks of social hierarchies and epistemological shifts. Photography isn’t just about a single image. It’s always part of something bigger.
When you look at Instagram today, does it feel like a break?
Or part of a longer history?
It’s a continuum. People were already overwhelmed by images in the 19th century, when photography became mass-produced. And later, in the early 20th century, writers and theorists were describing a similar sense of overload.
What’s different now is scale, access, and our relationship with machines.
Social media introduces algorithms into the equation in a new way.
The utopian promise was that anyone could share work and build community, regardless of institutional access. And that still exists to some extent. But the algorithm is not built to sustain a creative photographic community. It’s built to keep you on the platform. It has nothing to do with being creative or discovering new work.
There’s also something darker there – photography as healing, and Instagram as the thing that makes people feel more alone.
Yes. The more connected we become, the more disconnected and isolated we feel.
That’s not unique to photography, but it’s something we addressed directly at LACP.
We built a multi-year project around loneliness called Reservoir – bringing together invited artists and mentors from different backgrounds and stages in life to develop work over nine months as a cohort.
By the end of the first year, we had 38 new bodies of work and a new micro-community.
This year we introduced 30 artists and the year 1 exhibition is now traveling.
For both the artists and myself, the goal was that if you walk into the space, you feel seen, no matter what your experience is.
What did that look like, visually?
There were many different approaches. There were 38 bodies of work, including installations, video and audio based work, shown across two floors, and almost all artists showed multiple images.
One of the projects that really resonated with people was by Lisa McCord.
She experienced mental health issues throughout her life, starting in her early twenties, and she always documented what she was going through. For this project, she decided to chronicle that chapter of her life and put it out into the world.
On site, we created an installation that included a six-foot-wide self-portrait of her, restrained to a bed, which she restaged based on one of her hospitalizations in the early 1980s. Underneath it, there was a handwritten book with photographs where she told her entire story, using images from her early teens up to a photograph of her sitting with her psychiatrist, whom she credits with the decision to share her story publicly. You could sit next to a small table, flip through the book and listen to Lisa share her story through headphones.
Another work was an AI-based project by Jacque Rupp.
She asked AI to hallucinate what a grandmother looks like in 2025. That resulted in dozens of portraits, which she turned into a video where the faces morph into one another on a loop. The loop was shown next to a printed grid.
There’s something very strange about them.
My kids stood in front of it and said, “Our grandmothers don’t look like that at all.”
It’s about how the machine imagines women of a certain age, based on biases in the datasets.
And then, across from the digital-based and AI-assisted grid, there was another grid in black and white-yet analog and tactile. This was a site-specific installation by Diane Meyer, who worked with over 100 small-scale black-and-white found photographs.
She hand-painted the backgrounds, leaving isolated people, sometimes objects, and hand-mounted each photograph on the wall. All the images had a physical presence – almost like small objects.
Her tactile black-and-white grid was placed directly across from the AI-generated grid.
How do you decide what to curate? Is it personal, or structural?
It starts with a broader perspective and different motivations. What is pressing for photographers right now? What do photographers think about?
What can photography do that no other field can do? How can we address larger issues in and through photography? Then it becomes more specific – what makes sense for the institution, the space, our community, and the audience.
It’s not just about liking someone’s work. It has to feel meaningful, relevant, and impactful. And it also has to have longevity, since we plan exhibitions years in advance.
Tell me about the current exhibition. How did it come together?
It actually started as a conversation. Ali LeRoi and I were here at LACP last year, and he mentioned that he had all these images he captured while on the set of Everybody Hates Chris, which he co-created with Chris Rock, wrote and directed. Ali always had a camera while working on set, and captured hundreds upon hundreds of images that chronicle not just the life of the production, but the connection between the people who have become each other’s community. As we were coming up on the show’s twentieth anniversary, I suggested to Ali we will finally share these with the world.
When Ali invited the actors to experience the exhibition, they all said the same thing: they remembered the camera, but had no idea what he was capturing.
When you look at the images, people aren’t performing. They’re not in character. They’re looking at him as Ali, you see them as themselves.
So it’s not typical behind-the-scenes photography. It’s a person documenting his environment from the inside. It’s a story about chosen families, and how we constantly perform in various spaces. The title of the show, Everybody Hates Exhibitions, references that complexity.
And when you see the totality of the work, it becomes a story about a chosen family, belonging, and his relationship to his biological family. There are also interventions – we’ve included images of Ali’s own family, and a conceptual project around his parents. Once you experience that part of the exhibition, it changes how you understand everything else.
The exhibition then goes beyond the show. It’s about how we present ourselves, how we perform, and how we reconcile what we show with our own experience. It’s a way of thinking about how and when we decide to share ourselves with others, which, I think, is an important conversation to have in the age of exhausting social media.
It felt like he told his story twice. Once through the show, and once through the photographs.
In a way, yes.
And there’s also something else – it felt like he’s walking inside his own story.
Almost like a tourist inside a narrative he already wrote.
Absolutely. Ali talks about how he deliberately kept certain things about himself private.
This is his first attempt at reconciling what he lets people see and what he actually went through. So it’s not just revisiting and mining his personal archive: it’s opening something up.
This is an entry point, and a project that will continue on growing.
As a curator, do you think about whether something is “art”?
Not really. Context matters. The same image can mean different things depending on how it’s presented.
What matters to me is whether the work tells a story in a way that feels compelling, impactful, and relevant. The rest sorts itself out
In 2025, you curated The World’s Greatest: Photography On and Off Stages. What drew you to those worlds?
I was interested in spaces that exist slightly outside the center of mainstream culture – circuses, county fairs, punk scenes, boxing arenas, live music spaces.
Not really the performances themselves, but the people and communities built around them.
What connected all the projects in the exhibition was that they were long-term documentary projects.
The photographers weren’t just visiting these environments; they spent years in them and with those communities.
Candace Biggerstaff photographed traveling circuses and the unconventional family structures formed behind the scenes. David Hanes-Gonzalez reconnected with his own Mexican-American identity after discovering Mexican boxing.
Kevin Salk documented punk and metal communities in California that he had been part of since high school.
Ryder Collins photographed county fairs in Washington while thinking about economic shifts and his own family history. And Thouly Dosios photographed fairs while exploring the social contradictions and cultural intersections of Los Angeles.
For me, the exhibition was never really about spectacle. It was about belonging.
These spaces become ways for people to build identity, community, ritual, and alternative families.
And I think documentary photography can reveal something important there: not just how people look, but how culture itself is formed.
After everything we spoke about – what’s happening now with the photograph itself?
I’m seeing a deeper interest in the presence of the photograph as an object, in mixed media and alternative processes, in the tactility of the printed image and three dimensional explorations of photographs..
I also see more artists thinking about printing: the paper, the material, what it does to the image.
And recently, and for the first time in the last decade, I heard from students that they’re printing their work, making photo albums, and hanging images on their walls at home.
Final Thought
Dr. Rotem Rozental is watches the watchers.
As a photography historian, curator, and researcher, she is less interested in the single image than in the people, systems, and technologies surrounding it.
At the Los Angeles Center of Photography, she builds exhibitions years in advance because she is already thinking about where photography is moving next – what will matter culturally, technologically, emotionally, and politically before most people fully recognize it yet.
What makes her perspective unusual is her ability to connect seemingly distant moments in photographic history into one continuous line: from Google Street View and machine-made image databases, to Instagram, algorithms, and AI-generated faces.
For Rotem, these are not separate phenomena.
They are part of the same transformation in human vision.
And this is why she does not spend much time asking whether photography is “art.”
The more urgent questions, for her, are larger ones:
What kind of society do images create?
What happens when machines begin shaping memory?
What does loneliness look like inside hyper-connectivity?
What happens to truth when photographs become endless, automated, and detached from physical reality?
There was something quietly brilliant about the title We All Hate Exhibitions – a play on Everybody Hates Chris, but also a reflection on visual exhaustion itself.
Rotem understands that we live surrounded by endless images, endless scrolling, endless performance.
And yet, she still believes in the physical exhibition space.
And despite her deep engagement with technology, she also recognizes something else happening at the same time: a growing human need to return to physical experience.
Maybe that is why AnalogCon felt so meaningful – not as nostalgia, but as a human need to touch photography again.
That tension became especially visible in AnalogCon – a surprisingly emotional celebration of analog photography, material process, and community.
Not as nostalgia, but almost as resistance.
A reminder that in a world of infinite digital images, people still long for photographs they can physically hold.
And that is exactly why her exhibitions are worth following.
Not only to understand where photography is going – but to discover new photographers, new ideas, and new ways of seeing before the rest of the world catches up.
