This is the first in a series of occasional articles observing newly arrived cultural figures as they seek to get the lay of the land in Southern California.
WHEN I met up with Charlotte Cotton one winter Saturday, I found her in what would seem a very unlikely place for the head of the photography department at a major encyclopedic museum: the basement of the decidedly un-encyclopedic (that is, small, funky and idiosyncratic) Echo Park art space Machine Project, among folding chairs, computer equipment and a recently acquired collection of carnivorous plants. She was concluding a meeting with the organization's director, Mark Allen, about a project she hoped to involve him in, relating not to photography but digital music.
Cotton, who began at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art last June after several years in New York and more than a decade in London (she was raised in the the rural Cotswolds), is the picture of a bright, ambitious young curator: 36 years old, inquisitive, stylish and strikingly intelligent, with a broad, scholarly vocabulary and the sort of opinions that put one at odds with one's more traditional peers. She is the first to permanently fill the photo curator post at the museum since the death of Robert Sobieszek in 2005, and although she clearly holds her predecessor in high esteem, she comes from a different generation -- one that takes photography's full integration in contemporary art practice for granted -- and has little interest in limiting her efforts to what she frequently refers to as the "photo ghetto."
She speaks less of prints, therefore, than of projects, commissions, discussions, publications, websites, musical events, film programs and cross-disciplinary collaboration. Indeed, though steeped in the history and theory of photography, she seems most excited looking beyond the boundaries of her field -- as her presence at Machine Project would seem to attest.
Allen is characteristically genial. He loads Cotton with Machine Project documentation, plays video footage of an exhibition they'd been discussing (an installation by Brian Crabtree and Kelli Cain involving a room full of amplified egg-tapping robots) and promises to take her invitation into consideration. Sensing, perhaps, a note of ambivalence, she hastens to assure him of the sincerity of her interest.
"I'm sorry if it sounded like I wanted you to do the entertainment," she says. "I hope it's more than that."
