projects.
I’m Ash Cooper Kerns, a Los Angeles–based photographer working between street, portrait, and constructed image.
My work comes from attention: how people move through space, how the body holds memory, how something shifts and becomes visible, often just before it dissolves again. Sometimes that attention is returned, in the form of awkward eye contact with strangers.
The path here wasn’t direct. Law, nonprofit work, art direction, and tech. Different rooms, same habit of watching small details too closely. Between 2009 and 2019, a long stretch of illness narrowed the physical world and quietly reshaped how I see. Photography remained. Sometimes reduced, sometimes reconfigured, but never gone.
© Randy Shropshire
In 2025, a breast cancer diagnosis brought that question into sharper focus: if not now, when. The work shifted with a clearer pull toward what persists: the tension between surface and interior, control and dissolution, the seen and the felt. Much of it returns to the body, not as a fixed image, but as something lived, negotiated, and in flux.
These days, the work continues in Los Angeles and elsewhere, following what reveals itself in the in-between. Leo, my dog, has yet to be convinced any of this is necessary.
about.
