Photography Collection

In the most comprehensive exhibition of its type ever undertaken, The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens will showcase a 150-year span of Los Angeles photography, featuring some 200 works from The Huntington’s collections and other institutions, collectors and, in some cases, the artists themselves. “This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in L.A. Photographs” is organized by Jennifer Watts, curator of photographs at The Huntington and independent curator Claudia Bohn-Spector. Unlike New York, Paris, or London—cities with rich photographic traditions that have been intensely studied in exhibitions and publications—the photography of Los Angeles rarely has been the subject of sustained scholarly investigation, says Watts. “And yet, its history dates back nearly to the advent of the art form itself,” she says. “What’s clear is that L.A. photography quickly began to define itself in terms of the region’s climate, landscape, diversity, and its sprawling urban and suburban areas.”
For well over a century photographic images and icons have shaped a unique sense of place for Los Angeles, she says. The exhibition is an unprecedented effort to view L.A. photography through the dual lenses of landscape and the human body, offering a provocative counterpoint to more traditional, chronological histories of the medium. Works from early photographers—among them William Henry Jackson, Carleton Watkins, Imogen Cunningham, and Edward Weston—will be displayed alongside photography by commercial and studio practitioners such as George Hurrell, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Philippe Halsmann, and works from Maynard L. Parker and the “Dick” Whittington Studio. Artists of more recent vintage such as Ansel Adams, Garry Winogrand, John Baldessari, Robbert Flick, and Catherine Opie will be on display as well. In all, more than 100 photographers and photographic studios are represented.

Divided into seven sections—Garden, Dwell, Move, Work, Play, Clash, and Dream—the exhibition demonstrates how photography has defined life in the city across time. Carleton Watkins’ 1877 picture of Santa Monica, shot from high on a bluff, is juxtaposed against Joe Deal’s 1979 stark landscape view of Inglewood; Catherine Opie’s 2004 print of Oliver in a Tutu echoes Ida Wyman’s 1949 street portrait of Girl with Curlers; G. Haven Bishop’s 1915 street scene at night foreshadows the bawdy allure of John Humble’s 1991 Selma Avenue at Vine Street, Hollywood, an iconic image of Los Angeles as self-promoting caricature, with a billboard emblazoned with pink block letters screaming “Angelyne” in the foreground.
“The show brings together imagery that encapsulates both the glories and the unfulfilled promises of the great American enterprise, and every stage in between,” says Watts. “From the region’s spatial configurations to its distinctive light, engineered environment, and its celebration of physical culture, health, and fitness, something truly emblematic emerges. It is variously ‘the city that brings it together’—the city’s official slogan—as well as the ‘nightmare at the terminus of American history’— a descriptor coined by L.A. historian Mike Davis.” The exhibition comprises some 200 historic and contemporary images drawn from The Huntington’s collections; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the J. Paul Getty Museum; the University of California, Los Angeles; L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art; the Japanese American National Museum; as well as from loans from collectors and photographers. The core of the show comes from The Huntington’s rarely displayed photographic archives. Henry E. Huntington, the founder of the Huntington Library and one of the original architects of the Los Angeles area, believed strongly that L.A. was the “city of the future.” His convictions resulted in a photographic collection unparalleled in its visual documentation of the explosive transition of
greater Los Angeles from pastoral hub to thriving metropolis. Included in the exhibition are works from the archive that range from the earliest extant landscape image of Los Angeles, taken in 1862 by William M. Godfrey, to the soft-focus Pictorialist imagery of the 1910s and 1920s sponsored by the Automobile Club of Southern California’s first magazine, Touring Topics. The curators also mined the Huntington’s Southern California Edison archive, the Maynard L. Parker archive, and the “Dick” Whittington Studio archive—among others—for visually compelling images representing the rise of Los Angeles through the remarkable demographic booms of the 1910s and 1920s on through the postwar era. An expansive display, the exhibition occupies two venues at The Huntington that sit several hundred yards apart. The Huntington has commissioned a site-specific photo-based installation by Los Angeles artist Allan Sekula that will appear in the gardens between the two gallery spaces. “Like the show itself, Sekula’s piece questions how photographs shape a region’s history and how the region, in turn, is shaped by the imagery it engenders,” says co-curator Bohn-Spector.


This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in LA Photographs
Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Library West Hall and Boone Gallery
San Marino, CA
1151 Oxford Road
Till Sept. 15