Juliana Halpert has done her share of interviews, but mostly she’s been the one asking the questions. When I visited her at home in a hilly neighborhood of northeast LA, she greeted me with some relief, curious and glad to be on the other side of the equation. 

Halpert has a robust practice as an art writer (her prose has appeared in Artforum, Frieze, Bookforum, and this magazine, among others) as well as a thriving career as an artist, principally using photography. She’s been straddling the two pursuits since college; and while it’s challenging for her—and admittedly somewhat confusing to others—it allows her to exercise complementary impulses: to think critically and form cogent arguments in language; and in visual media, to turn off that part of her brain and make a little mischief. 

“Photography is home to me,” Halpert says, having worked as a photo assistant, interned in the photo department at The New Yorker, and done time in a lab, in addition to years of shooting in a diaristic manner. But she cringes at being called “a photographer.” She’s less interested in making pictures and putting them on the wall than in the camera-wielding act itself and its implications, power dynamics, and ambiguities. 

For her 2025 two-person show with artist and writer Chris Kraus, “Civil Commitment” at LA’s Bel Ami, Halpert presented an oblique map of her own origins through an array of pictures centering on her mother’s workplace and the broader landscape of Montpelier, Vermont, her hometown.

“Bountiful Years,” her 2024 solo show at Sebastian Gladstone, featured a series of pictures she made covertly in the office of now-former Artforum co-publisher Knight Landesman in 2017, shortly before she left a nearly four-year stint working in production at the magazine. Just a few months later, Landesman resigned after multiple allegations of sexual harassment, and Halpert’s pictures of his desk, telephone, and handwritten notes assumed the aura of crime scene evidence. 

The work brings photography’s innate indeterminacy to the surface, along with its lurking complexities and mutable meanings. “I really didn’t think they were art,” Halpert says. “I just needed to memorialize that place I loved and knew I’d never see again. The pictures don’t take a stance. They’re just looking at the world that was there.”

Some told Halpert they saw those photographs as a form of homage—and they were right too, in the sense that the images enshrine a realm defined by paper and print. Halpert describes herself as “a very online person,” but in her work she gravitates toward the transitional moment when print media began to give way but early digital media was thrillingly tactile. “People were so excited about screens and wanted to screenify everything, but the digital was still very object-based. That period in time is my sweet spot, what I find aesthetically pleasing.”

For the pair of pieces Untitled #1 (SPP) and Untitled #2 (SPP), 2024, she uploaded slideshows of her cats onto digital picture keychains. For another, Untitled (bric-a-brac), 2023, she stayed anachronistically analog, filling a found photo-Rolodex with her own snapshot-size prints. 

While she says she doesn’t feel like “much of a maker,” Halpert does seem to relish unmaking—stripping away conventions, foiling expectations. That might mean dusting photographs with pigment and fixing them to the wall with masking tape, or creating a video montage in glitchy, low-tech VHS. It definitely means taking off the serious-critic’s hat and abiding by Mike Kelley’s advice that it can be important to play the fool. 

“I don’t want to be a really cold, smart artist,” Halpert says. “I like there to be just a little bit of a wink in everything I do.”