Lauren Berley’s photographic work spans several decades, a wide range of interests, and thoroughly-detailed observations over multiple formats and disciplines. Consistent throughout her imagemaking history is a cinematic and intimate experience of the world, humanity, and the opera of existence. For three decades, she has enjoyed shape-shifting her body of work, evolving her style and viewpoint experientially, in the focuses of fashion, celebrity, documentary, and street photography between Los Angeles and New York City.
Born in Upstate New York’s farmland and raised in Aspen, Lauren spent her entire childhood riding and handling horses. This powerful and formative relationship between human and equine remained within her, tugging at her spirit throughout years of immersion in a bi-coastal urban lifestyle.
In her twenties, Lauren began a career in Los Angeles, photographing young Hollywood and its glossy 1990s fashion, an environment where she developed her bold and powerful style, an often- dramatic relationship between shape, texture, and mood. With these sensibilities etched in her, she took to the streets of New York City where her insatiable, edgy curiosity layered her work with wonder and fascination.
Lauren’s images are included in permanent collections, museums, and publications that range from flashy chain-mail swimwear to powerful editorial portraiture, to the gritty wasteland of Ground Zero… images that emote, memorialize, or forever tell the story of NYC in the wake of 9.11.2001.
“I have never lived on the surface. I can’t function there.”
In 2014 Lauren set aside the camera for a spell, moved to Denver, and began painting and experimenting with mixed-media under the mentorship of contemporary artist Michael
Dowling. She has found working with new tools invigorating, spontaneous, and playful, feeling it in her work and in her person. Her painted oil and charcoal work speaks of a childlike curiosity with animals and the patterns of the natural world, while exploring the themes of rank, status, and self- definition in the human world, most often combining the two, to execute playfully poignant, sarcastic themes.
Since returning to Colorado, Lauren has regrown her rural roots, settling into a home where she enjoys raising chickens and ducks, cultivating fruits and canning/jamming/dehydrating, and most recently, has leased a horse named Cadi. The developing relationship between war-worn midlife urban artist and spirited senior horse has inspired Lauren profoundly, continually, and from this return to the equine lifestyle, a body of work has emerged.
