My friends who teach photography on the college level tell me that we might as well start referring to all pre-digital photography as produced by “historical processes.” That’s fine with me.
I’m reminded why when I look at Los Angeles, Portrait of a City (2009), a photographic history of LA collecting some 500 images, some newly discovered in archives, museums, and private collections, some by well-known photographers such as Julius Shulman, Garry Winogrand, William Claxton, and others.
Edited by cultural anthropologist and graphic design historian Jim Heimann and including essays by historian Kevin Starr and literature scholar David Ulin, Los Angeles, Portrait of a City deploys images to layer this space of urban surfaces with time and context.
Photographs may be close to the prototype of Walter Benjamin’s mechanically reproducible art as described in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” It is true, of course, that time, wear, and loss tend to reattach to historical photographs the primitive awe and reverence Benjamin associates with the experience of unique works of art.
Today I’m more interested in how the chronological distance of historical photographs revision and bestrange our familiar places--among other effects, how they can show us built objects in relationship with natural ones.
In this anonymous photograph from the 1890s, a native Washingtonia filifera fan palm foregrounds the San Fernando mission. The columnar trunk of the palm and the arc of its crown are echoed in the colonnade of the mission.
Making sense of that sounds like a good “Arcades Project.”
Edited by cultural anthropologist and graphic design historian Jim Heimann and including essays by historian Kevin Starr and literature scholar David Ulin, Los Angeles, Portrait of a City deploys images to layer this space of urban surfaces with time and context.
Photographs may be close to the prototype of Walter Benjamin’s mechanically reproducible art as described in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” It is true, of course, that time, wear, and loss tend to reattach to historical photographs the primitive awe and reverence Benjamin associates with the experience of unique works of art.
Today I’m more interested in how the chronological distance of historical photographs revision and bestrange our familiar places--among other effects, how they can show us built objects in relationship with natural ones.
In this anonymous photograph from the 1890s, a native Washingtonia filifera fan palm foregrounds the San Fernando mission. The columnar trunk of the palm and the arc of its crown are echoed in the colonnade of the mission.
Making sense of that sounds like a good “Arcades Project.”
