For most of my career, I worked in fashion, luxury and lifestyle, creating campaigns, building brands and spending a lot of time thinking about what makes an image connect with people.
Photography, however, was never really part of my professional life. It was personal.
I’ve always taken pictures. Usually nothing planned or staged. I would notice the light hitting a building a certain way, an incredible sunset, the shape of a street corner, something happening on a beach, or just a moment that made me stop. Wherever work or life took me, I kept taking pictures.
Most of them simply stayed with me.
And over the years, I realized that the images I kept coming back to weren’t necessarily the most perfect ones. They were the ones that reminded me of a place, a feeling or a particular moment in my life.
CaliCuration really started during the pandemic. Looking for a distraction and something creative to do, I began selling a few of my photographs as prints on the boardwalk in Venice, California. Eventually, we put them online and quietly started building from there.
Even the name happened pretty organically. During a hike in Southern California, a friend said something about California always needing to be curated. Somewhere in that conversation, “CaliCuration” came up. And yes, I know many Californians cringe at the word “Cali.” Maybe that’s part of why it stuck.
What started with California has since grown into a much broader collection of places and moments from my life and travels.
But the idea behind it hasn’t really changed.
I believe the art we live with should mean something to us. It doesn’t just need to fill an empty wall or match the furniture. It can remind us of somewhere we’ve been, somewhere we want to go, or simply create a feeling every time we walk past it.
There is another part of CaliCuration that matters just as much.
Every photograph at CaliCuration comes from a real place and a real moment. No AI-generated imagery. No stock photography. No staged photoshoots. They are photographs I actually took — often spontaneously and originally just for myself.
That matters to me, particularly now when it’s becoming increasingly difficult to know what is real and what isn’t.
I’ve always felt that if you build a business, there should be some responsibility attached to it. Giving back shouldn’t be something we pull out for a campaign or talk about once a year. It should simply be part of how the business works.
That thinking is behind the CaliCuration Wall Art Impact Fund, through which we want to make the connection between the art we sell and the communities we support increasingly direct and transparent.
We’re starting with Los Angeles and New York because those are the two places that have shaped so much of my own life and perspective. From there, we’ll see where the journey takes us.
CaliCuration has evolved quite a bit from those first prints on the Venice boardwalk, but what I want it to be is actually pretty simple:
Real photography. Art with a story behind it. Something you want to live with. And a business that leaves a little something behind beyond the sale.
Thanks for being part of it.
Peter L.
Founder, CaliCuration
