SEASONS
Seasons is an artist-run contemporary photography gallery started in 2024 in Los Angeles, California. We are currently located in Chinatown at 422 Ord St (2nd Floor) along with our friends The Fulcrum Press, Gene’s Dispensary, and Leroy’s Happy Place.
Gallery Hours
12:00-5:00 PM Saturdays or by appointment.
For more information or to schedule an appointment email us at info@seasons-la.com or visit our instagram.
SEASONS 08: Ben Alper Memory Palace
Artist
Ben Alper
Statement
“Rome is a place almost worn out by being looked at, a city collapsing under the weight
of reference.” -Graham Joyce
Rome lingers in the mind — a psychic space as much as a physical one where, as Freud suggested, all layers of history coexist. Alper’s work explores the city as a living palimpsest: a place where antiquity and modernity collide, and where remnants of the
past persist beneath the surface of the present. Long shaped by photographs, films, and cultural memory, Rome is encountered here not as a singular image but as a layered and incomplete experience.
Alper’s photography bears witness to the tension between revelation and concealment that defines the city. Rome becomes a stage on which history is continuously performed and mediated — through restoration scrims, illuminated monuments, and the constant movement of its spectators. Tourists, pilgrims, and locals alike become part of this choreography, framing themselves against ruins and monuments and transforming the city into both backdrop and collaborator.
Like a broken mirror, the photographs are both reflective and fragmentary. The camera’s tendency toward flattening and compression echoes Rome’s own ability to collapse epochs, architectures, and meanings into a single, multifaceted plane. These images function less as objective documents than as reconstructions — attempts to translate the city’s sensory and historical density into a visual language that
acknowledges the impossibility of fully seeing.
At its core, the project operates as a memory palace. Each photograph preserves an encounter, a residue of lived moments layered in the mind like the histories buried beneath Rome’s ancient streets, momentarily fixed before returning to the flow of history and memory.
Bio
Ben Alper is an artist, photographer and publisher based in Carrboro, North Carolina. His work has been exhibited and published both nationally and internationally. He received a BFA in Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art & Design and an MFA in Studio Art from UNC - Chapel Hill. He is ½ of Sleeper Studio and the co-founder of A New Nothing, an online project dedicated to hosting visual
conversations between artists.