featuring liz kuball

Liz Kuball (b. 1973) is a photographer based in Southern California.
She began photographing in 2006. Since then she succeeded in building up a portfolio in which she reflects a personal vision on her neighbourhood and the people surrounding her.
In search of surprising 'not-too-well-known-talent' I felt the need to contact this young imagemaker and was happy to receive an enthusiastic response.

I asked Liz to comment on a random image of her project 'California Vernacular'.


© liz kuball

This photograph is part of my California Vernacular series. I think my statement for the project gets at what I’m looking for in terms of the overall feeling: “When you move out to California from back east, you come for a reason: You’re leaving behind a bad relationship, or escaping your hometown, or thinking you’ll be a star. And what you find when you get here is that things aren’t what you thought they’d be. There’s some of what you expected—sunshine and palm trees and long, wide beaches. But there’s more: houses with cacti and succulents in place of the green lawns you grew up with; women in bikinis climbing ladders; trees groomed in an archway, the expected path between them blocked by a gateless chain-link fence. You answer an ad on craigslist for a used car and find yourself in a boxed-in car lot in Van Nuys and go for pie at Du-par’s afterward, because pie makes sense when you’re on Ventura Boulevard and it’s 95 degrees and the car wasn’t what the ad said it would be. And you’d think that, after all this, you’d become disillusioned and go back home, and some do, of course, but many more of us stay and instead of growing bitter, we hang on—hang on to a world that, to us, is even more fantastic than the one we thought we’d find, because it’s real in its absurdity and because we have stories to tell.”

I took this photograph on a Tuesday afternoon in February. Often, I take an hour out of the afternoon to drive around looking for photographs, and this was one of those days. At the time I take a photograph, I don’t stop to ask myself why—I operate on instinct. Later, when I’m looking over my photographs, I try to see if my instincts resulted in anything that helps me communicate what I’m trying to say about Southern California. It’s a feeling I’m after, and this photograph taps into some of the feelings I have about this place.

Liz


Liz Kuball's blog