BIO
Safi Alia Shabaik was born and raised in Los Angeles. She discovered her visual voice at the early age of five in a children’s pinhole camera class at the California Museum of Science and Industry. She earned her B.A. with honors in Fine Art at UCLA, where she studied with many accomplished contemporary artists, including Catherine Opie, Richard Jackson, Paul McCarthy, Barbara Drucker and Mark Alice Durant. She has lived and worked in both Los Angeles and New York. While living in NY, she became fashion stylist, photographic documentarian, personal assistant, travel companion, and confidante to the legendary and iconic Ms. Grace Jones, both in her personal and public life.
Safi’s work has been featured in The New York Times, Black+White Photography, Lenscratch, Alta Journal, Catalyst: Interviews, CameraCraft, VoyageLA, The Advocate, Edge Of Humanity Magazine, Upworthy.com, and in Grace Jones’s book: I'll Never Write My Memoirs. She has been featured on The Candid Frame (episode #465), and her work has earned her recognition in PhotoLucida’s Critical Mass Top 50. In collaboration with the Parkinson’s Foundation, Safi is the proud recipient of a Visual Arts grant from the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA). She is the first (ever) recipient of the Las Fotos Project Foto Award for Self-Expression, presented by the Photographic Arts Council Los Angeles. Her work is in several private collections, and she has exhibited in both solo and group shows in galleries across the nation. She is a founding member of the Los Angeles Street Collective.
STATEMENT
My interest in the human condition and relentless curiosity for people and things has led me on many adventures exploring and documenting daily life on city streets. To quote Robert Frank, “I’m always looking outside, trying to look inside. Trying to say something that is true. But maybe nothing is really true. Except what’s out there. And what’s out there is always changing.” My affair with the street began during my art school college years, inspired by the legacy of many street photographers - Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Helen Levitt, Mary Ellen Mark, Susan Meiselas, Weegee, Garry Winogrand, to name a few. I have spent countless hours hitting the pavement with camera-in-hand to build my visual voice, hone my eye, strengthen my intuitive ability to anticipate human behavior, and capture life’s grand choreography as it unfolds in front of my lens. The portfolio above presents a small selection from an ever-growing body of work chronicling daily life on the streets of Los Angeles, ranging from 2015 to current day. It presents my version of truth, which is constantly evolving with the reinvention and revitalization of the city itself. This has become my visual creative journal marking a deeper relationship with the city in which I was born and raised, the city that I left for nearly a decade to which I eventually returned, and the city for which I have gained a profound new respect and love.