Imagine landing a photography commission from Converse at age 15 and then having your career explode like fireworks. That’s the story of ultra-talented 22-year-old photographer Olivia Bee, a Portlander (Oregon) who is now based in Brooklyn. In January, she was featured as one of Forbe’s “30 under 30” to watch list of artists and style innovators.

Olivia will be back home in Stumptown this weekend to launch her first photography book, “Kids in Love” published by Aperture at Nationale Art Gallery on Saturday, May 7 (4–5:30PM) 3360 SE Division, Portland.

She also has an exhibition as part of her book launch at New York’s Aperture Gallery through May.

About the book and Olivia’s work:

Kids in Love is the first book by the twenty-two year old photographer Olivia Bee, whose work follows in the tradition of Nan Goldin and Ryan McGinley. She is celebrated for her dreamy and evocative portraits of friends, new loves, and the young people around her, all on the brink of adulthood and new possibilities. Bee gives voice to the self-awareness and visual fluency of the millennial generation; her vision of capturing the world around her “in the moment” fits in seamlessly with the image-laden world we live in today. In a conversation with Bee included at the end of the book, Tavi Gevinson, founding editor of the online magazine Rookie, writes about what it means to make work that is raw and vulnerable, the phenomena of being “nostalgic for twenty seconds ago,” and other shared experiences.

Olivia Bee