by R. Thorne
Several years ago, a university friend of mine joined the ever increasing herd of creatives moving from the creative capital of New York to the new (and better) creative capital of Los Angeles. As I was doing my duty shuttling her around town during open gallery hours, she opined that “Los Angeles was not a town that showed photos.” Being a photographer herself, this was tantamount to saying that LA was an uncultured dystopia.
Fast forward four years and add in a kinda global art market collapse and you would have a hard time going out gallery hopping on any weekend and not only seeing at least one exhibition focused on photography but often seeing several photo shows on the same block.
The past few weekends I spent time at the Bergamot Station galleries next to the train tracks in Santa Monica and I encountered not one, two or three, but four photo exhibitions. This is a number larger enough to start a critic theorizing. Photos are usually easier to produce, display and store and therefore can be sold at more moderate prices; is this a way to stem the bloodletting?
At Rose Gallery, a small and decidedly photo-based gallery had striking exhibitions of works by Max Aguilera-Hellweg that started out as assignments for the Sunday LA Times during the 1980s. Much of the photos document Latino life in East LA and Boyle Heights. Photos of females throwing gang signs, crowds of children, and mariachis provide a window into pre-multi-Eastside gentrification, when the area was a thriving hub of Chicano culture.
Craig Krull Gallery offers a selection of photos by Julian Wasser (whose hero, Weegee, allowed Wasser to accompany him on a on book tour) presents a view of “1960s it girl/boy Hollywood” with selects from the Whisky-A-Go-Go showing dancers, a young twenty-something female bare chested and viewed through a reflection in a mirror, bikini-clad girls taking turns feeding a lone male ice-cream, and other variants of a polished and erotic youth culture in 1960s California.
Galerie XII is showing haunting and surreal photos from longtime set decorator Lauri Gaffin—images of various desolate feature film sets on which she worked. The pictures quietly document the extremely Californian way in which these spaces are both real and fictional. Several read like Salvador Dali desert paintings brought fecklessly to life, particularly an image of a sweetly pastel ice cream truck with strange earth-colored spires in the background.
Returning from Bergamot, I tried to remember the last time I saw three consecutive shows which all had something genuine to say about the world we are in, said it, and said it with some modicum of style. The market may be forcing this moment upon us, but I’ll take it.
Image: Lauri Gaffin, Sweet Licks, Land of the Lost, 2009, Courtesy Galerie XII.