EXIBITION ESSAY

Capturing Us All
The Photographs of Diane Cockerill
by Louis Jacinto

I’m a big fan of film noir movies, those gritty films from the 1940’s in beautiful black and white and usually in Los Angeles.

The streets are empty and dark, the sky is big, the buildings are tall but barely lit, and we go along to see how the bad guy or gal will be caught in the end.

Diane Cockerill’s images of Los Angeles remind me of film noir. But her images are usually in color and beautiful. But there is still this sense that we are on a journey, waiting to see how it all ends up.

But what beautiful images we get to see along the way.

Sometimes we tend to dwell on how different those “others” are from us and we forget to realize that we all have much more things in common than not. Diane’s travels throughout Los Angeles – all of Los Angeles – shows us that in our beautiful city, even those areas that we haven’t been to in a while, are also beautiful, and look like the neighborhoods where our own homes are. We are connected, we do share this beautiful city, we have so much more in common with each other than not.

That is the lesson of taking a journey through Diane’s eye.

Diane Cockerill has captured us all.