This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in L.A. Photographs

Contrary to popular belief, Los Angeles does not defy description so much as provoke it. Literary representations of an “earthly paradise,” a “city of dreadful joy” and, more recently, a “city of quartz” are among the best known in a seemingly endless stream of identifiers. Over the past 150 years, potent relationships between glamour and catastrophe, sunshine and noir, have fascinated photographers trying to explain an elusive Los Angeles.

Many photographers have created images that draw on the city’s unique spatial configurations, distinctive light, and Mediterranean pretentions. Others have documented the region’s unabashed celebration of physical culture, health, fitness, and Hollywood’s allure. All helped create a unique sense of place in Los Angeles and in turn helped shape the city itself.

This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in L.A. Photographs examines the dynamic relationship between the city and the art of photography from the 1860s to the present. Divided into seven thematic sections - Garden, Move, Work, Play, Dwell, Clash, and Dream - the exhibition explores photographs of the city through the dual lenses of landscape and the human body, as well as the provocative visual interplay between the two.

When photography reached the United States soon after its 1839 invention, Los Angeles was a tiny pueblo that hardly invited photographic curiosity. With California’s entry into the Union in 1850, and the arrival of the first transcontinental railroad 26 years later, thousands rushed to seize the promised land that boosters invoked. The building boom of the 1880s, the parallel rise of the oil and motion-picture industries in the early 1900s, and the completion of the Los Angeles aqueduct in 1913 proved vital to the transformation from village to metropolis. At once raw and compelling, Los Angeles stirred the imagination unlike any other place in the United States.

Photographers answered the siren call, helping to frame the debate about just what kind of city Los Angeles was meant to be. Nineteenth-century luminaries such as Carleton Watkins and William Henry Jackson produced images alongside others, but all the pictures speak of a multifaceted place: a city wrenched from its Mexican past, wracked by racial and ethnic tensions, yet proud to consider itself emblematic of the nation’s stride into the 20th century.

The new century rendered the Los Angeles booster project at once more persuasive and glaringly trite. On the one hand, the city was, in the words of social critic Morrow Mayo, a commodity, “something to be advertised and sold to the people of the United States like automobiles, cigarettes, and mouth wash.” On the other, it was a real place, home to increasing multitudes who embraced an imagery created to persuade them of the region’s glorious future.