Bobby Hundreds

Long Story Short LA is pleased to present Noun by Bobby Hundreds.

On Photography

My first (and last) official photo show was at the California Museum of Photography when I was 18 years old. I peaked early. Glen E. Friedman and Craig Stecyk curated an exhibition of young skate photographers, and I was handpicked to display my work (some of which I’ve recovered for this exhibiton). After that, I was convinced more photography shows and books were in my future. But they never materialized. I solicited galleries. I chased book agents. They all shared a lack of interest.

“Photo books don’t sell.”

“Sorry, we don’t do photography shows.”

“So, where am I supposed to showcase my photos?”

“Put them where everyone else does. On Instagram.”

And so, I did. I also used Tumblr, Twitter, Substack, and Threads. The Hundreds became a vehicle to feature my photography through the blog and lookbooks. But it always felt strange to present this type of work in the same venues that were populated with food pix and memes. The context was wrong, like publishing a poem on the front page of TMZ, a banana bread recipe in the Wall Street Journal.

Why is there less reverence around thoughtful photography? For example, some of my graphic designs are best reserved for plastisol prints on T-shirts while other art may be better suited for framed canvas in a group show. With writing and visual arts, it seems less complicated as to what goes where. With photography, however, there seems to be less discernment with and regard for the craft. Perhaps it’s the screens.

Social media has done wonders for photography, but it’s also affected consideration and consumption of the art. It’s conflated phone selfies with studio portraits, it’s blurred the lines between filters and developing. If there was an app that gave everyone a single-click ability to express themselves in oil paintings (and there will be with generative AI), think of how that’d reshape how we appreciate fine art. Same goes for ChatGPT and essays like this one. It would become difficult for the layman to separate the wheat from the chaff, the special from the stock. It would all become special. It would all become stock.

I want you to imagine a world before smartphones and digital cameras. A time without Instagram and social media. When the one photographer in your school shot for the high school newspaper, Asian tourists were mocked for carrying cameras as accessories, and the only people who forced you to sit through their slideshows were your parents’ friends after they got back from a vacation.

Before digital, you had to be thoughtful and selective about which moments to freeze, as photography incurred film and development costs. You really had to make a photo count. Pictures were precious, priceless, and they spoke a thousand words. Otherwise, most memories were felt, experienced, and lived through. Catch and release.

Now, imagine how powerful it must’ve felt to frame the world through your lens, to capture a memory forever how you’d seen it, and to write life’s narrative by your own pen. Think of the feelings of control, of observation and study, to be a part of it and still apart from it. Photography was a purposeful act, a deliberate means of engaging with people and one’s surroundings. It opened the mind, it trained one’s eye to find beauty, it helped you tell history the way you wanted it told.

I’m not trying to overstate its importance, but photography is a sacred art and I hope this show serves as a reminder. It’s informed so much of my life, who I’ve become, and most of all, how I see the world. Herein lies an anthology of my work from my early adolescence in the 1990s to the year 2023, from high school skateboarding photos to live punk shows, charismatic friends to scenes from the sky.

The title of my show is Noun, which is defined as “a person, place, or thing.” Nouns have always had it right:

People first. Places second. Things last.

Whenever I get asked where I draw inspiration from, I answer accordingly: stepping outside of myself and into someone else’s shoes – seeing life from a different vantage point. When I look back at the breadth of my photography, it seems like these are the buckets my images sort themselves into. This is what I’m most curious about.

People first. Places second. Things last.

In the last year, I’ve drastically reduced the amount of content I feed the Internet. This means less phone photos, which means being present and available for the people and places before me. I’d gotten into such a severe and mindless habit of documenting everything that I never stopped to ask what I was collecting all these moments for, and to what end? On your deathbed, do you hand in fifty hard drives of photos in exchange for a plaque?

You’ll never have enough time to browse through the hundreds of thousands of photos in the Cloud, so I guess it’s more about stockpiling memories…just in case (of what, I do not know). Eventually, we will wear technology that will record (surveil) our surroundings 24 hours a day and then maybe people will stop deliberately taking photos as often again. Social media, the way we used to use it, and its value are already waning anyway. Soon, it will be just us left, once more. The photographers.

Even though the photos folder on my phone is barren, I’ve actually never stopped taking photos. In fact, I continue to carry a camera on me every day. I still see brushstrokes in the clouds and Mona Lisas in a smile. I develop my pictures in the evening out of ritual and I file them into their appropriate folders. Many of these photographs are for me and may never be shared. I do open the archives occasionally the way one might own a museum and walk the hallways at night. It’s funny how photography is supposed to be still, fixed and permanent, but with time, my pictures seem to have changed and hold new meaning. Because I have changed and hold new meaning.

This is Noun.

—Bobby Hundreds