Bil Brown
Bil Brown is a lens-based artist living and working in Los Angeles, California as a photographer, cinematographer and director. Whether working in portraiture, fashion-like imagery, or photojournalistic-like essays, Bil’s vision captures highly energetic moments and extremities of the conscious world, or the foreboding prescience of what is to come. Often using his work as a platform for advanced ideas, social-change, and excising historical reference or addressing current events, Bil pushes the boundaries of his storytelling into a concrete-poetry infused with empathy for our current cultural milieu. Bil is an editorial contributor to magazines and periodicals such as LA WEEKLY, DETAILS, PAPER, The Sunday Times (UK), PURPLE FASHION (FR), FLAUNT, PAPER, SCHON, AUTRE and publisher of his own Black & Grey magazine.
Bil’s photography has been exhibited in numerous group and solo shows. His 2018 show at the Leica Gallery LA, in conjunction with the estate of the late Jim Marshall, PROTEST, vehemently documented the 2016-2017 resistance following the election of an American President.
Bil has had a long relationship with Leica, featured in multiple issues of Leica Fotographie International and the 2018 Leica S Magazine Annual, and most recently the Leica Blog. In early 2020 Bil was asked to be part of the Leica M Campaign, “Whatever It Takes, Be Original” and teach with Leica Akadamie USA where he taught the popular online course Fragments Toward The History of Photography.
An MFA graduate of Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School where Bil’s teachers included co-founders Allen Ginsberg and filmmaker Stan Brakhage. At the turn of the millennium Bil co-founded the “Prague School” of poetics, which received grants from the Rockefeller Center, the NEA and Arts International.
The Prague School focused on the relationship of the Avant Garde between the Americas and Central Europe, including Czech Surrealist Jan and Eva Svankmejer, American Spoken Word artist Lydia Lunch, Czech photographer Josef Koudelka, and an aesthetic partnership with Vienna’s own School of Poetry. To Bil’s mind, his artistic return to Vienna is long overdue.
Bil lives in Los Angeles with his family and often travels to Europe, Asia, and across the Americas.
Image Copyright Bil Brown.
