‘The certainty I feel about a strong photo is probably the greatest feeling of certainty I have ever felt’: Adali Schell

Adali Schell’s project The First Car earned the Los Angeles-based photographer the 2nd place in the Portraiture category of the 2024 Professional competition. Drawing upon his childhood memories of discovering the ‘city of stars’ through the window of his dad’s 1980s Mercedes, the series depicts Schell’s friends in their first vehicles, evoking the sense of a shared journey, half-forgotten memories, and the feeling of youthful restlessness growing up in Los Angeles.

What drew you to photography in the first place and how has your relationship with the medium impacted your daily life?

I discovered my interest in photography by total accident. A product of the digital democratization of the medium, I received my first camera at 11 years old, a 4th generation iPod Touch, the first model to implement a built-in camera. While I wanted an iPod to text friends and play games, I became infatuated with the camera and how the world looks through it. Existing on this two-dimensional screen with a seemingly unlimited shutter, I was hooked, and began photographing nearly everything around me; billboards, fences, bus stops, cars, concrete, friends and anything else in light or shadow became my muse.

While my interests have certainly changed overtime, my compulsion has largely stayed the same, and there is much continuity from then to now. At 13 years old, I became obsessed with photographing sports cars, and I’d have my dad drop me off at busy intersections where I’d wait for hours to watch some fancy car race by. In more recent times, I made The First Car, which placed me second in the Portraiture category of the Sony World Photography Awards 2024 Professional competition and has become my first serious body of work detailing my experiences coming of age in a car-dedicated society.

Can you walk us through your creative process: how do you approach your topic? Do you already have an idea in mind of how you want your images to look? 

It starts with this restless feeling in my body that I have to honor by moving. I think I take pictures because I have a really hard time just staying still. Once I'm on the move with my camera, it is just about observation and intuition, this blind trust in the world which I think is what brought me to photography – this belief that the world can introduce me to things that are way better than anything I could come up with. I cannot work in a studio all day because the world is so magnificent and mind-blowing that I need to get out of the house and ground myself in it. I then get my 35mm film developed and digitize the negatives to archive them, before making my selections and taking those images to a darkroom where I make 11x14” prints out of them.

My process is always changing, but what doesn’t change is that I never know what I'm looking for. I always go out in the world confused and I try to free myself from preconceptions as to what I think I should be looking for or what a photograph of mine should look like. Then every once in a while – maybe a couple of times a year if I'm lucky – I will take a picture that I did not expect nor know I could make, and that changes my whole viewpoint.

Your series The First Car won 2nd place in the Portraiture category of the Sony World Photography Awards 2024 Professional competition - how did this project come about?

This project feels as though it was the culmination of my entire life story so far - growing up in Los Angeles, a city devoted to the automobile, I’ve oriented my life around the commute; bus fares, ubering, and car problems take up an enormous amount of my brain power. Fortunately, I was raised by an environmentally-minded father who had a 1983 Mercedes Benz 300D which he converted to run on vegetable oil taken from various restaurants throughout the city. It was in his car where I had my earliest experiences in LA; the cushion of the old leather seats, sound of its old speakers and smell of its falafel/french fry exhaust is deeply linked to my upbringing.

Three years ago, after almost 20 years of ownership, my dad decided to sell the car. Being such an important part of my life, I decided to buy it off of him, adopting his eco-friendly vegetable oil practice into my life.

The car quickly made its way into my work and became the favorite car to ride in amongst my friends. It also was where my camera was often pointed out of or towards. It wasn’t long until I realized that many of my favorite photos involved my friends in my car, however it wasn’t until I met Eve Lyons, photo editor at the New York Times, who helped me realize the work to a greater extent. She was instrumental in pushing me to explore these themes on a deeper level, and together we worked on pitching this project to the New York Times, titled The Magic Of Your First Car, which was published in February 2023.

Since then, I am in the final stages of transforming the work into book form which will be published in correlation with my exhibition at the Leica Gallery in Beverly Hills in April 2024.

The series – and your wider body of work – explores the ideas of community and togetherness, looking in particular at youth culture, with a strong influence of your Angeleno upbringing. How do you connect with your subjects and the locations you focus on?

Given my upbringing in Los Angeles, the work has naturally taken form as a fairly auto-biographical project. My favorite pictures that will be in my book and show are ones of the people in my life who I am closest with, in places which anchor my friendships and sense of self. 

I feel it’s also worth noting that I spent four pretty miserable years in the suburbs two hours outside of Los Angeles in the Inland Empire between the age of 14 to 18. While I lived there, I had very few friends and was not driving, but would rather take the train into LA from time to time. On these trips, I’d find myself feeling haunted by who I might have been had I stayed in Los Angeles, had I been able to go to one of LA’s many wonderful art high schools, had I managed to meet like-minded kids. It wasn’t until I was 18 when I could move back to LA due to my parents’ divorce, which ultimately allowed me to meet everyone featured in the work. Making this work between the ages of 19-23, much of it feels fictional, as though I am trying to rewrite my own life experience, as though I stayed in LA this entire time. My time away in the suburbs fueled me to make this work.

What were the first photographic works that made a big impression on you and had an influence on your own practice?

The first photographer I discovered was Vivian Maier. My dad showed me her documentary, Finding Vivian Maier, at age 14. I was so shocked that at the end of the film I turned to my dad and exclaimed, “I know what I’m going to do with my life now!” The very next day, I was photographing people from across the street in Downtown, too afraid to get close to anyone.

I’d only known of Vivian for a number of years, until I later got introduced to the lineage of great documentary street photographers of the later 20th century such as Garry Winogrand, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander and more. However my favorite work came later, in response to MoMA’s Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort which in my view applied the candid eye of the street photographer to more private and personal domains. Photographers such as Nan Goldin, Lise Sarfati and Mike Brodie changed my worldview and helped me realize the power of photographing my own community.

Alongside the recent acclaim at the Sony World Photography Awards this year, you have also graduated from UCLA - congratulations! Can you tell us about the last few months since then, the impact the Awards have had on your practice, and what you are currently working on?

I feel very grateful to have been named in the Sony World Photography Awards amongst so many wonderful photographers, being part of this has done much for me - between exhibiting the work in London and helping boost my esteem, I am very fortunate for this opportunity. Since the Awards, I have graduated from UCLA and am currently working on transforming this work into book form in correlation to my exhibition at the Leica Gallery in Beverly Hills this coming April. Additionally, I have a six-year long exploration of my family in rural Ohio titled New Paris that is nearing completion and will hopefully be ready for a book and show at some point soon.

You can find out more about Adali’s work on his website and Instagram. The Sony World Photography Awards 2025 Professional competition is open for entries until 10 January 2025, 13:00 GMT. Enter your best photo series for a chance to win $25,000, a solo exhibition in London, a range of top Sony digital imaging equipment, and benefit from global exposure.

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