“I’ll be here when you get home…

…dontcha worry about no surprises

…you don’t even have to phone, just come on in.”

Let me introduce myself.

My name is Laurence Jones.

Some know me by various variants of that name. Nobody calls me anything near my middle name. I’ve struggled with identifying as an ‘artist.’ I don’t participate in ‘white cube’ spaces nor do I have an MFA from one of ‘those’ universities either. Everything I’ve done in terms of creativity has been to ‘make space’ for myself and those that find themselves ‘like’ myself in this ever-shifting world.

Some would say I’m an archivist or visual essayist. I feel most comfortable identifying as a storyteller operating at the intersection of architectural topography, memory, and social rhythms. I was born in Redwood City during the Strawberry Full Moon of 1982. I was raised 5 miles away in East Palo Alto, California. My worldview was forged within the complex, nuances shifting landscapes of suburban San Mateo and Santa Clara counties. It was also held in relief with the ‘Oasis’ of San Francisco, Oakland and places beyond. My formative years were somehow both a Robert Bechtle painting while living in a loop of Harold & Maude.

My formalized artistic practice began nearly fifteen years ago when they loaded film into their Uncle Lawrence’s old Pentax camera. It lead to me writing for Curbside Classic, into Queer Astrology spaces and becoming a vinyl DJ. Through all of those additional creative practices, photography has served as a grounding anchor through the chaos of my late twenties into my mid forties. The image has made me understand where I fit into the system. It makes me realize that being a puzzle piece that can inquire is a really frightening responsibility I carry. I worry that I ‘see’ too much, or say too much, yet feel the pressure to still say it out loud. Photography allows me to say it more quietly that a heated debate, which I’m known to be prone to. Regardless of whatever camera I carry for the day, my hope is to preserve people, spaces, and objects that we may collectively value before they are permanently erased by the narcolepsy of ‘progress.’

My photographic practice primarily functions as an analysis of the span of humanity. We arrive and often we alter the natural world we inhabit. More often not behind the windshield of some car, I arrive at distinct categories, hoping to find some correlating ‘truths’ in the variance.

• Urban + Architecture + Street Life + Landscape

I left the suburbs for a reason. I worried that if I stayed in the suburbs, I’d die. There’s variations I could detail about that conclusion yet it is one I came too very young nonetheless. My favorite math still is geometry. The angles and beauty of the city, in contrast to the wide open spaces beyond the confines of the big city, the suburb and the small town will always delight me. I put my feet in the dirt to wash off the city yet I need the city to feel related to the rest of humanity. I can’t have a life that’s not the peace of earth at its most natural state more live without the spontaneous human theater that occurs in intensely built environments.

• Portraits:

I hope and wish within those, you get to see the possibilities that happen when you get ‘close’ to people. Sometimes it’s fleeting, sometimes the faces repeat. I love the narratives I could, and probably will tell you about each and every one I’ve shot.

• Suburbia & Small Town:

These highlight the transition from dense city centers to decentralized expanses where most Americans actually live. Given how oppressive those spaces have historically been, especially in my personal experience, I’m not fawning over them. They are my roots, yet I’ll forever live with the feeling that they weren’t healthy for me and everyone I knew from them. It wasn’t the Birth of The Cool that Oakland Museum of California tried to sell me on around 20 years ago. It was more the hell of an Updike novel if he wrote Stepford Wives as a television series. There’s a reason why queers still try their best to flee to the biggest town nearby at bare minimum

• Automobilia

Often the tool of escape, with its own complications is the car. I escaped myself in a 1990 Oldsmobile Delta 88. I’ll always remember strapping my bedroom mattress to the roof, hoping I’d never have to return. My dedicated focus on the weathered steel of mid-century concoctions, especially favorites of mine like Cutlasses, Corvairs or Cougars. They aren’t mere machines. They can be (problematic) vessels of Liberation, symbols of joy, and kinetic markers of home.

Throughout these diverse settings, I strive to make this salient:

“We belong to places as much as places choose or reject us. Even when a space rejects us through the societal churn of capitalism, we are still allowed to wish for something better than our present moment. Call that nostalgia or hope for the future, but it might be the only way we can save ourselves and the world around us.”

Despite the Jewish Grandmother and well, you know how most Black folks got European Ancestry, Despite some of the faces you see, this work is hella Black & Queer at the same time. It’s a huge reason why I never ended up or continue to ‘fail out’ of those ‘white cube’ spaces. It’s more hilarious when I fail out of those spaces when they curated by those that clearly could be considered ‘Skinfolk’ but sure as hell ain’t ‘Kinfolk.’

That is deeply personal. I can’t ‘go home’ anymore. East Palo Alto has shifted from 55% to 9% Black during my lifetime. I’ve witnessed a similar thinning of the herds I find myself wanting to assign myself to through the gentrification of historic Black sanctuaries like Oakland. I can’t bring Mirror, Mirror Beauty Salon back to life. Miss Nicole and Miss Capuchine succumbed to AIDS more than 30 years ago. There’s no space in 5-over-1’s for Trans hairdressers. I hope I help you question why that’s a bad reality, what we have culturally lost and why community is in shambles. I’ve become a stronger queer through observation and recognizing the limits my health puts on me.

This work is an open invitation into a concept of home: a dedicated monument to the faces and spaces that offer solace, dignity, and hope for a vibrant, revolutionary future.

You can find my writing currently at Tasteful Rude, DJ Larsupreme, Dynamic Drive , Substack & Medium. 

Contact

You can reach Laurence by emailing them here.