PROFILE
For her most recent project, the book Villa Bonita, Littky photographed every resident of a historic Hollywood apartment complex. She speaks fondly of her shoots. “Each of my encounters [and my] time spent with each resident was special in different ways. So much magic came out of there.” The building itself, veiled in ivy and decorated with an extravagant cursive typeface, epitomizes old Hollywood, replete with allusions to “Sunset Boulevard” and “Singin’ in the Rain.” The Villa’s current residents, however, are varied and contemporary, dreaming dreams not confined to the realm of the silver screen. Villa Bonita romantically documents the lives of a group of people, diverse in age and background, their most notable commonalities the roof under which they live and a shared desire to follow their individual passions. Littky captures the Bonita dreamers and dwellers in the midst of the seemingly mundane activities that constitute their routine, although aspects of their daily practices are often weighted with inspiration. It is those moments, straddling the boundaries of the commonplace and the exceptional, that Littky aimed to capture. When she asked Josh, the photographer/bartender, what he did in his apartment, he said he took three showers a day, because that’s where he did his best thinking and came up with his best ideas. “So obviously,” said Littky, “I had to photograph him in the shower.” Littky’s next LA show — at the De Re Gallery West Hollywood in Spring, 2018 — will feature a new series, American Fair, her survey of state and county fairs and fair-goers across the country. Vulnerable and layered, Littky’s images are rich in texture and emotion. She conveys the qualities of her subjects that make them most real and relatable, in the midst of quotidian but often striking moments. Her work is empathetic, loaded with the common thread that runs through our individual and collective experience of what it means to be human.
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