Lori Pond

https://www.loripond.com / @loriapond

Lori Pond grew up in the heart of Orange County, under the shadow of Mickey Mouse’s ears in Anaheim, California. At around age ten, she caught the photography bug from her father, an amateur photographer with a garage darkroom. Together, they would venture out to Joshua Tree each spring, capturing macro images of ephemeral wildflowers and later developing and printing the photographs themselves. 

Around the same time, Lori discovered her passion for music, studying flute and piano and eventually earning a place at the internationally renowned Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, where she graduated with honors. She later pursued an MA in Broadcast Journalism at the University of Southern California and went on to work in television as a graphic artist until 2020. 

Throughout her diverse career, Lori’s love for photography never waned. Over time, her practice evolved to embrace conceptual, alternative, and experimental approaches. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, is included in both public and private collections, and has been widely published. In recent years, Lori has deepened her engagement with the photographic community. As an advisor with Pasadena Photography Arts, she has helped secure grants, curated exhibitions, and co-hosted programs such as FORUM and Open Show. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

The Atlas of Chimerical States explores chance and impermanence through lumen prints made with found objects and foraged plants from around Los Angeles. When wildfires swept through the city earlier this year, I turned to this process as a way to face uncertainty, retreat into beauty, and stay present.

Each print is shaped by intuition and chance. I arrange plants and objects on expired 1975 Russian photo paper and expose them in sunlight. Weather, moisture, and plant pigments all interact unpredictably, while dabs of historic photographic chemistry—developer, fixer, and cyanotype solutions—create unexpected blues, greens, and halos of color. Left unfixed, the prints slowly fade, embodying the impermanence at the heart of the work.

This project reflects a larger conversation about making art in response to place, time, and change. Using local materials and sunlight, I explore how the environment—including forces we cannot control—shapes the creative process. By scanning the lumens and printing them at a large scale, up to 36 by 50 inches, the intricate details become visible, even as the originals themselves vanish.