PhotoAlliance Presents: Fall Lecture Series @ Fort Mason Center
PhotoAlliance presents a compelling lecture featuring artists Brenda Kenneally, Jett Lara, and Paula Levine. This evening of discussion highlights each artist’s innovative approaches to contemporary photography and its larger role in visual culture.
The artists provide an overview of past, present, and upcoming work, and also field questions from the audience at the end. Join PhotoAlliance for what is sure to be an inspiring and thought-provoking evening. A reception follows the event.
Brenda Ann Kenneally is a mother, teacher, multi-platform documentary worker, Guggenheim Fellow, and Pulitzer Prize Nominee. Kenneally’s lived experience with incarceration, homelessness, and poverty in her youth, has shaped 30 years of immersive image-based collaborations in community with kindred spirits across America. Situated in image-based historical context, her work debunks the myth of “Bootstrap America” and exists as an antidote to internalized shame for those who “fail” to achieve it. Brenda explodes the “dangerous” fly on the wall myth of documentary work by harnessing the transformative power of photography to build counter narratives.
Kenneally’s “Upstate Girls” project led her to form A Little Creative Class, Inc. The non-profit arts organization has a mission to address the obstacles that deter marginalized communities from engaging in creative expression.
Kenneally has received institutional recognition including; fellowships from The Soros and Warhol Foundations, The NEA, The W Eugene Smith Grant for Humanistic Photography, World, National Press Awards, New York State Council for the Arts, NYFA and Humanities Council Funding, Canon, Getty and Mother Jones grants.
Kenneally says that some of the most important documentary work she has ever done led to a collaboration with her desert community to replace her best friend Sun Shine’s condemnable house trailer.
Among other feats of documentary magic Kenneally has been blessed to pull off, was a cross-country trip from upstate New York to Bombay Beach, CA with six teens who struggled with trauma based social anxieties. Kenneally funded, produced, documented, and drove the bus for that trip. In 2025, Kenneally expanded “The Scrapbook Project” movement that she founded in 2008, to include an ongoing collaboration with The Skid Row Artist Community in Downtown Los Angeles.
Jett Lara is a photographic artist living in Los Angeles since 2016. Lara is known for his work in Los Angeles and his deep connection to his subjects, shaped through chance encounters and orchestrated images with the people in his world. The world he invents through images was shaped by years of lived experience and self-taught photography. His photographs are an exploration of hard truths, challenging the viewer into deeper layers of seeing.
Lara’s self-published debut monograph, Dreams & Nightmares, was released by Norkwwd in 2025. It is an intimate exploration of Downtown Los Angeles and its surrounding neighborhoods, uncovering the inner core of survival within the city’s restless landscape. It is a parallel depiction of one of the most complex neighborhoods in Los Angeles where beauty and brutality coexist.