The True History of the Los Angeles Center of Photography and The Julia Dean Photo Workshops

By A. Jay Adler

Julia Dean fell in love with photography when her parents gifted Julia her first camera. Then a neighbor in her small Nebraska town of Broken Bow actually traveled to far away Switzerland and back, and a dream was born. Julia fell in love with journalism at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, and then with teaching a decade later when her mentor at UNL, George Tuck, asked her to take over his classes while he was on sabbatical. But people? Julia seems to have loved them from birth – making friends with them, bringing them together with each other in their own friendship and mutual support, being creative with them. All these have been the ingredients of Julia’s career, and they are what created The Julia Dean Photo Workshops (JDPW) and the organization to which it then gave birth, the Los Angeles Center of Photography (LACP).

Julia also fell in love with Los Angeles and Venice Beach, where she moved in 1994. After a couple of decades of traveling, teaching, and photographing around the country and the world, she sought a more permanent home. During her first five years in Los Angeles, Julia taught photography at various colleges even as she began work organizing her first great collective endeavor, her international photo project Child Labor and the Global Village: Photography for Social Change. Financially, these were challenging times. One doesn’t pursue careers in teaching or socially-concerned photography to make a lot of money. So Julia also taught classes out of whatever loft she was living in, posting flyers all around town. Once she had partnered up in life with writer and English professor Jay Adler, and felt just a little more financial stability, she felt motivated to teach her classes from some more permanent location. Thus, The Julia Dean Photo Workshops (JDPW) were born at the foot of the Venice Pier, opening for business in January 1999.

Though Julia didn’t make much money during her first twenty years as a photographer, she did make a lot of friends, relationships she formed and maintained from all her endeavors in so many locales. She drew on them in creating JDPW. From the free plumbing and painting work by the likes of pal Dercum Over to those first-year guest classes and public events featuring names such as National Geographic’s Gerd Ludwig  and Joel Sartore (one of Julia’s first students at the University of Nebraska), L.A. Times Pulitzer Prize winner Clarence Williams, and perpetual student favorite Bobbi Lane.

While Julia taught a daunting schedule of her own classes, with one employee helping to run the business and Jay writing or rewriting the course descriptions and copy-editing catalogues, she was also busy growing JDPW, even as she was ever in need of more capital. It wasn’t any wonder that no one had ever founded a major photo workshop school and center in Los Angeles before Julia (or has ever really tried since): the profit margins are thin. Only Julia’s friend from old Maine Photo Workshop days, Reid Callanan, with the Santa Fe Workshops, has ever owned the secret sauce for privately-owned financial success. All the other centers are nonprofits, and Julia maintained that idea in the back of her mind even as she drew on more friendships for financially supportive loans. Here, it was former students, lawyer Elizabeth Gregory and, repeatedly, Julia’s financial godmother, Ingrid Hanzer, who offered the loans that enabled JDPW to survive and thrive.

During its 14-year life under the JDPW banner – in three increasingly larger premises, first in Venice, then in Hollywood – the Los Angeles photo community embraced its new center with enthusiasm. There was finally, and continuing, a place where amateur and professional photographers alike could meet, both in classes and socially, and make friends, meet collaborators, learn and begin careers. At the center of it all, often at those public events and holiday parties, was Julia Dean, welcoming and embracing all with her passion and her signature beaming smile. There were the travel workshops, too, all led by Julia, 25 in all over a ten-year perios, to all points in the world: Paris, Prague, Budapest, Transylvania, Morocco, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Mississippi’s Blues Highway, Nebraska’s small towns, Peru, Ecuador, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos. So many friendships, so many careers begun.

By JDPW’s seventh year, in 2006, Julia decided that to keep growing, she needed to partner with a concern that had greater financial resources. She proposed a joint venture with Samy’s Camera, and received with enthusiasm. In preparation for the expansion, Julia hired Brandon Gannon, an employee at UCLA extension seeking new career opportunities, to serve as day-to-day operations manager of the joint venture. Then, almost before the venture began, Samy’s Camera abruptly withdrew from the agreement and began offering classes of its own, seeking to hire Gannon away for itself. Gannon took a chance and chose to remain with JDPW. Julia took a chance in choosing to retain Gannon: she and Jay borrowed $35,000 against their home in order to finance Brandon’s salary and continue operating while they sought to recover from the setback. The three held weekly kitchen table meetings to manage finances and even a radio advertising campaign directed by Jay.

In time, with no visible disruption to the business, JDPW recovered. Julia taught Brandon the daily business operations, which he gradually assumed as general manager, while Julia maintained the educational and public programing and continued to seek to put JDPW on a sounder financial footing for the future that she continued to imagine and create. Once again, it was Julia’s creative vision and personal relationships that deepened the foundation of JDPW. In 2008, she approached Baret Lepejian, of A&I Photo Labs, and proposed a partnership. The deal was concluded in January of 2009, with Baret and Vic Lepejian now 75% majority owners of JDPW. The Workshops then moved to their third headquarters, on Seward Street, in Hollywood, and four years of greater financial security ensued.

While JDPW continued to grow and thrive in its educational mission, and in its crucial role as a center for the L.A. photo community, the economics of the photographic-education category remained unchanged. Julia began to prepare tor JDPW’s transformation into a 501c3 nonprofit, so that the organization could seek charitable donations in addition to its business revenues. By 2013, Julia had persuaded the Lepejians to this course of action and worked with JDPW’s accounting firm (almost from the start, Julia’s personal accountant), to plan the transfer of assets. With her accountant’s help, Julia prepared and filed the voluminous paperwork, and in 2013, JDPW officially transformed into the nonprofit Los Angeles Center of Photography (LACP), gaining its 501c3 status in 2014.

Julia had already begun assembling a board of directors. Some years earlier, she had been contacted by a Los Angeles lawyer and financial advisor who had read a newspaper article about her socially-concerned photography, including that pre-JDPW global photo project, Child Labor and the Global Village.. The lawyer wished to work with Julia and help her in her socially-concerned projects. That lawyer, Michael Miller, of Northern Trust, became LACP’s first board president. Other members of the board were Julia’s former street photography students, JDPW teachers, and other photography contacts. The first fundraiser for the nonprofit LACP was held at Miller’s magnificent Bel Air home in 2014.

Over the next six years, LACP continued to innovate programs and events, from its summer youth programs and full-time-study and certificate programs to the Boys and Girls club program that Julia piloted in Boyle Heights by donating her time for two years to teach weekly classes. Then, with a grant, Julia expanded the program to ten clubs. The program’s first full year culminated in an exhibit at the dnj gallery in Santa Monica, attended, among others, by the boys and girls and their families.

All the while, working with Gannon, Julia sought each year to stage still more successful fundraisers, with the primary lure the stunning photographs offered for purchase or auction that Julia was able to obtain from friends such as Douglas Kirkland and Greg Gorman and talented non-professionals such as Jeff Bridges. By 2019, LACP had enjoyed consistent and notable year-after-year revenue growth and moved into its fifth new and stunningly designed, 6900-foot headquarters in Culver City. The grand opening of that facility on December 14, 2019, attended by hundreds, was a culminating moment in the history of JDPW-LACP and a literal dream come true – after 22 years of leadership since the founding – for Julia Dean. (Many thanks to Art Streiber, LACP’s first Stieglitz award winner, who brought his many Hollywood friends to our fundraiser.)

Then, within months, the Covid-19 pandemic that took so many lives across the world, and disrupted the lives of  so many more, disrupted the life of LACP, too. In 2021, Julia Dean and the organization she built parted ways. Yet Julia remains proud beyond measure of the legacy she created and that she leaves behind in JDPW-LACP, and of her role in the history of the photography community of Los Angeles. That creative legacy was the middle third of her professional career. Other pages on this website detail her next bold phase of creation: The L.A. Project.

This is the true history of The Julia Dean Photo Workshops and the Los Angeles Center of Photography.