Show LA Photographic Arts Fair and Expanding Image Culture

Feature image: Show LA. Photograph by Erhan Us.

SHOW LA is a fair that brings together the world of photographic arts. Standing out as a community and creative platform, it connects visitors with carefully selected galleries and publishers from around the world while offering a program that includes special exhibitions, Low–Fi installations, talks, book signings, a photography competition, and an auction. The 2026 edition of the event took place from February 26–March 1, 2026, at The Reef in Downtown Los Angeles, across a 16,000 square foot venue.

SHOW LA is a fair that brings together the world of photographic arts. Standing out as a community and creative platform, it connects visitors with carefully selected galleries and publishers from around the world while offering a program that includes special exhibitions, Low–Fi installations, talks, book signings, a photography competition, and an auction. The 2026 edition of the event took place from February 26–March 1, 2026, at The Reef in Downtown Los Angeles, across a 16,000 square foot venue.

Georgina Reskala [12:37] is a California–based artist of Mexican–Lebanese descent. In her works presented at the Center for Photographic Art booth, she explores the transformative power of memories and stories. As she multiplies each image, she detaches a memory from its original moment in time, reshaping, transforming, or erasing it; in doing so, she reconstructs narrative and memory. Through repeating photographs and continuous re–shootings, she reveals how history can be distorted and how experiences change as they are repeated.

The artist’s interest lies in the moment when, through repetition, the recognition of meaning or image begins to dissolve. This moment manifests as the fragmentation of our collective memory, a light leak, a visual distortion, or a displaced mental state.

Jerry McMillan, whose works were presented at the Hannah Sloan Curatorial & Advisory booth [16:14], was a Los Angeles–based artist and photographer. His practice combined documentation, conceptual work, and photo–sculpture experiments that emerged in the 1960s. After moving to California in 1958 with fellow Oklahomans such as Ed Ruscha and Joe Goode, McMillan became an important documentarian of the mid–century LA art scene; he produced now–iconic, often staged portraits of artists such as Ruscha, Judy Chicago, and Barbara T. Smith, contributing to the formation of their public images.

Alongside his documentary work, McMillan was also a pioneer of photo–sculpture; by questioning the material limits of photography, he transformed images into three–dimensional objects. In early works such as Patty as Container (1963), he approached photography both as image and as object; he developed folded prints, photo–worked metals, and paper bag forms, thereby expanding the conceptual and physical possibilities of photography. His work was included in the exhibition Photography into Sculpture (1970) at the Museum of Modern Art, reinforcing photography’s transformation into a sculptural and philosophical practice.

As one of the key figures of the experimental LA art community, McMillan remained committed to photographic research throughout his life, producing conceptual works parallel to innovations in contemporary painting and sculpture. His extensive photographic archive documenting artists, performances, and the cultural environment of Los Angeles in the 1960s is now preserved at the Getty Research Institute, securing his legacy both as an influential documentarian and as a figure who made foundational contributions to the development of conceptual photography.

Beyond accompanying the Martin Parr selection at Rose Gallery, the photo–sculptures [19:01] have a quiet origin story. Yet behind them lies a tradition that is far from silent. Fotoescultura emerged in Mexico in the 1930s as the union of two older traditions: the three–dimensional commemorative figure and the monumental portrait photograph. Masters would take a family’s studio photograph, carve a wooden cutout matching the figure’s shape, attach the photograph onto this form, and then hand–paint it [with intense colors, enriched with jewelry, fabrics, and devotional ornaments] until the image became less a flat portrait and more a sculptural presence. The resulting work was neither entirely photograph nor entirely sculpture; it was conceived as something entirely third: an object meant to permanently preserve what might otherwise disappear.

This form was widely produced across Mexico, particularly in the years following World War II, when families wished to commemorate sons or fathers. By the 1980s, however, the tradition had largely disappeared due to cheaper production techniques and shifting aesthetic preferences.

The project began through one of the last remaining masters. About fifteen years ago, Martin Parr encountered a vintage fotoescultura in a gallery and asked about it; when the tradition [its carving, hand painting, and the unique chemistry between photograph and object] was explained to him, Parr became fascinated. The conversation soon turned into an idea: to bring images from his own self–portrait series to Don Bruno Eslava in Mexico City, one of the last masters who continued to produce fotoescultura entirely by hand.

Working closely with Graciela Iturbide, the pieces were developed with Don Bruno through experiments with surface, color intensity, and the specific details of Parr’s face until each achieved the desired presence. Don Bruno Eslava is no longer with us, and this collaboration was his final project. The resulting works are unique in every sense: singular, unrepeatable, and carrying on their surfaces the labor of three individuals; the photographer who captured the self–portraits, the person portrayed, and the master who transformed them into objects.

Persia Campbell, whose works were presented with a remarkable and rare frosted glass by Momentum Fine Art from Miami [19:09], develops her artistic practice between Mexico and the United States while focusing on the representation of women in Northern Mexico. In her photographs, she examines the intimate aesthetics of the border region and the narratives formed around identity, gender, and space.

Among the works shown at the fair, Reminiscences from the Border: Naturaleza Muerta juxtaposes colorful objects and decorative elements that highlight American consumer culture with the realities of Mexico’s drug war, making visible the tension present in the border region; while Ficheras: Newspaper in the Fridge questions female representations in Mexican cinema of the 1970s and 1980s and examines how political violence is aestheticized through media, visualizing the tension between history preserved like a cold case and consumer culture.

Brian Dailey’s artistic journey led him, before becoming an artist, through a 25–year period during which he worked in arms control and international security. This unusual experience forms an important source of inspiration for his present works.

His art examines both the external conditions of humanity and the internal dimensions of the individual. While his externally oriented works address the paradoxes of human behavior, war and peace, and the various faces of social destruction, the artist states he creates art to challenge the mind, not to entertain. His conceptual and performance–based practice incorporates a range of media, including photography, video, mixed media, installation, and painting. This means that the art market often struggles to categorize and curate his work, as with many multidisciplinary and conceptual artists. To elaborate, art institutions or curators often find it quite difficult [and sometimes simply feel lazy] to curate and write texts for practices that employ such diverse media. 

Dailey’s multi–media project Words [21:10], developed between 2012 and 2019, is the creative culmination of a seven–year artistic journey across 120 countries. Investigating the effects of globalization on human language, society, culture, and environment, Dailey invited random individuals in each country to stand before a camera and green screen and asked them thirteen words in their own language: 'peace, war, love, environment, freedom, religion, democracy, government, happiness, socialism, capitalism, future'. Participants responded to these concepts with a single word and chose a flag symbolizing their social affiliations. The work confronts viewers with contemporary global issues while provoking an awareness of global citizenship.

Aiming to provide an inclusive experience open to participation at any moment, SHOW LA avoids hosting a VIP opening, thereby bringing art, artists, and visitors together in a healthier environment. From the perspective of visitor experience, the fair is planned in a highly successful and enjoyable way; although one does wish to see more artwork labels. Otherwise, beyond the risk of works becoming detached from their contexts, photographs may also lose information such as signatures or edition details.

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