About Ann Summa

Ann Summa, based in Los Angeles and Mexico, specializes in documentary, travel and environmental portraiture.

Her clients have included People Weekly, Details, Parenting, Saveur, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, and ESPN the Magazine, and major corporations such as the Discovery Channel.  She has won awards from American Photographer and Women in Photography. 

Her book of punk rock images, The Beautiful and the Damned, is being published this fall by Foggy Notion Books/SmartArt Press in conjunction with an exhibition at Track 16 Gallery in Los Angeles, and Marc Jacobs’ BookMark in New York. Her images will illustrate Incredible Edibles being published in 2011 by Timber Press.

She is represented by Getty Images in New York, and also shoots stock for Corbis.

In pursuing magazine feature work, Summa has traveled often on assignment around the country and abroad. An inveterate traveler since her first trip abroad as a sociology student to Sierra Leone in 1970, she studied photography originally in Japan, where she lived for four years.  Returning to work in Los Angeles in the late ‘70s, she documented the punk rock sub-culture extensively. 

Other alternative movements she has photographed include the “third sex” in Oaxaca; spiritual leaders; pit bull women; and urban cycle tribes; and urban farmers.

Summa built a second home in the artist colony of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where she also volunteers for C.A.S.A., a non-profit center advocating women’s health and reproductive rights.  She has ridden five times in the 600-mile AidsLifeCycle bike ride, to raise money and awareness for those suffering from AIDS.

Summa has taught photography at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles for 12 years, and enjoys mentoring young photographers.