Kaucyila Brooke

Kaucyila Brooke is an artist based in Los Angeles. She has been a regular faculty member of the Program in Photography and Media since 1992, and served as its program director from 1999 to 2004 and program co-director from 1994 to 1999 and 2013 to 2015. 

Brooke’s multidisciplinary practice addresses the politics of cultural production and sexual representation. In diverse narrativized and serial formats--including large-scale photomontages, photo novellas, and photographic archives--she reevaluates the status of the photograph as object. Often based on archival research, many of Brooke’s projects focus on the recoding of the photographic genres of portraiture, still life, documentary reportage, and landscape. 

Pursuing a structural approach that is inherently allegorical, the work opens upon a range of interpretation brought about by the juxtaposition of disparate photographic fragments. “The Boy Mechanic” is an ongoing project that will document the history of lesbian bars in cities and towns across the United States and Europe. Loss of architecture and the frailties of public memories have often been the motivation for photographic documentation of changing urban spaces; focusing on the lesbian bar reveals how sexuality and sexual identity inform larger narratives about public identity and social space.