MOP"LA" Continued...

If you haven't read my post from yesterday and the comments on it, please go do so before continuing here. I contacted both of the co-founders of MOPLA so that they were aware of the issue at hand and heard nothing back yesterday. Instead of responding, they changed the language on their site from:

"With the support of the Photography Community, MOPLA will showcase the work of 160 Photographers who live, work and/or have extensive bodies of work relevant to Los Angeles (emphasis mine)"

to:

"With the support of the Photography Community, MOPLA will showcase the work of 160 Photographers worldwide."

There. All better.

Well, yes, had they just said that from the get go, no issue would have been raised really. My main problem lied in the fact that they purported to represent local photographers and were not doing so - that someone actually had come up with the (correct, in my mind) idea to make the festival about the local scene and then chose later not to follow through.

Now, it still does not address the issue of why MOPLA chose not to do this in the first place. We have such photographic talent in this city, as I hope this blog demonstrates on a regular basis. It would have been nice, were MOPLA to actually celebrate and showcase our community and if it were to better reach out to us, through things such as a juried show for local photographers to be showcased, as I mentioned in yesterdays post.

Hossein Farmani did just write me back saying he will respond shortly. I'm curious to hear what he has to say and will be happy to post it here out of fairness, if he agrees. I'm happy he's chosen our fair city for his next endeavor (read his bio to see just how much he runs in the photo world) and hope it progresses into something wonderful for photography in Los Angeles.

In all fairness to MOPLA and as I said in the comments yesterday, at this point and with things kicking off in a little over a week, there probably wasn't much more they could have done to rectify this. I can only hope that at the very least my suggestions fell on open ears and some of it was absorbed so that next year, we can consider MOPLA a home-grown event showcasing the wonderful talent we have in LA.

After all, We Can Shoot Too.


Related post - Eric over at PixFeed weighs in here.