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Exposing urban form: commercial architectural photography in Los Angeles, 1938-81
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Exposing urban form: commercial architectural photography in Los Angeles, 1938-81
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Content
EXPOSING URBAN FORM:
COMMERCIAL ARCHITECTURAL PHOTOGRAPHY IN LOS ANGELES, 1938-81
by
Isabel Frampton Wade
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
Copyright 2023 Isabel Frampton Wade
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ART HISTORY)
August 2023
ii
Dedication
For Papa, who taught me how to see the light,
and for Mama, who understood all along.
iii
Acknowledgments
When I was living in Chicago in 2014, homesick for California, I stumbled across a
series of tiny photographs of tiny houses in Los Angeles. These 2 ½ inch square photographs, all
black-and-white, show small glimpses of the stucco boxes scattered across so many
neighborhoods in Southern California. It is Judy Fiskin’s Stucco series (1973-76) and it was a
revelation to me. What I felt in her photographs was simple: a sense of home. And with that, so I
began looking for Los Angeles in photographs, seeking out the way photographs can conjure the
most intimate and profound sense of a place. This, I will admit, was my “idea” for a dissertation
when I came to USC. Without a specific time period, artist, or more concrete guiding question in
mind, I wanted to understand why photographs of California architecture captivated me so
intensely. Luckily, I found Vanessa Schwartz. When I was still searching for a dissertation topic,
she offhandedly told me to go look at Julius Shulman’s archive. As you will find out from
reading this dissertation, that was good advice. As I’ve learned over seven years, when Vanessa
tells you to do something, you do it, because she is somehow always right. Vanessa has not only
listened to me ramble about to my obsessional interests, including my love of Spanish Colonial
architecture and red tile roofs, but she has encouraged me to pursue them. At each step, she has
asked the question that drives my inquiry to the next level and has supported the premise of this
project in a way that no other scholar could. She never wavered in her belief that this could
become something, and that I could do it the way I wanted. Her loyalty and dedication to her
students has shown me how to show true care for one’s community. Thank you, Vanessa. I could
not have asked for a better advisor and advocate.
Thank you to my outstanding dissertation committee for continuous encouragement.
Suzanne Hudson leads by example: she has been incredibly generous in her time, advice, and
iv
support. Her insights have shaped this project in myriad ways. Without her, I could not have
figured out how to conceive of a project that bridged that thorny period between the historical
and the contemporary, and she has helped me think creatively and expansively about
periodization, artist biography, and American art history. Most importantly, her positivity and
optimism have carried me through the toughest parts of this process. Megan Luke’s methods
seminar in 2016 was the course that has been the greatest gift to me at USC because it taught me
how to read art historical texts, and I am often nostalgic for the discussions she facilitated.
Thinking alongside Megan has helped me grow as a scholar, and I am grateful to her for teaching
me how to look at photographs and interrogate their form, politics, and meaning. Thank you to
Bill Deverell for always having something encouraging to share about the project. His insight
into the history of Los Angeles has made me appreciate the city as a place to study and a place to
live in innumerable ways.
I have benefitted from the creative and rigorous courses taught within the Art History
department at USC; Susanna Berger, Jennifer Greenhill, and Daniela Bleichmar facilitated
courses that taught me how to be a better writer, researcher, and collaborator. The VSRI has
exposed me to excellent colleagues and brilliant thinkers over the course of my seven years at
USC, and has pushed me to think in more capacious, interdisciplinary ways. My thinking on
California architecture and design took shape as a result of conversation and advice from Amy
Ogata, and her wisdom on these topics was especially welcome during my qualifying exams. I
am grateful for the many conversations about this project that I have had both formally and
informally with the department faculty, who have been kind and encouraging interlocutors at
every stage of the PhD process. Thank you to Beth Massari and Tracey Marshall for fielding
endless questions, requests, and help for these seven years.
v
I am also grateful to my colleagues Emily Pugh, Zanna Gilbert, Tracy Stuber, and
Whitney Graham at the Getty Research Institute. Working alongside them on all things Ed
Ruscha has provided a joyous counterpart to my dissertation work. Delivering a talk at the Getty
Graduate Symposium in 2022 exposed me to engaged and helpful feedback that helped my third
chapter take shape. Thank you to the photographers, artists, and related family members,
including Douglas Hill, John Humble, Judy Shulman, Ja Drinkwater, and Ginger Drinkwater,
who graciously allowed me to interview them. Working on a project that edges towards our
contemporary moment has meant that I have been lucky enough to traffic in both historic
collections and living creators, and the dialogue that this has facilitated makes the period a
fascinating one to research. Thank you to Leslie Wilson, who has been my mentor since I was at
UChicago. Your love of photography and your kindness of spirit is something that has indelibly
shaped me.
Funding from USC’s Department of Art History and the Visual Studies Research Institute
allowed me to take several critical research trips to archives in Washington, D.C. and New York
between 2017 and 2020. The Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art funded a
pivotal year of writing for me during the pandemic. I am grateful to the Center for Creative
Photography and The Huntington Library for short-term fellowships that supported many months
of research that changed the course of my dissertation. Jennifer Watts, Linde Lehtinen, and Erin
Chase at the Huntington were each generous enough to speak with me about the rich archives in
the collection, pointing me in the right directions for uncovering research gems. My penultimate
year of writing was supported by a USC Beaumont Endowed Fellowship. Thank you to the
library staff who have made every archive visit I have undertaken a fun one. Scholarship would
not exist without their labor.
vi
Friends near and far have held me down and uplifted me. My dissertation writing group
helped to give my thoughts coherence and encouraged me to enjoy writing. At my most isolated
periods of work during the pandemic, my virtual meetings with Dan Abbe, Frances Lazare, and
Yechen Zhao uplifted me and inspired me when I could not find the motivation by myself. To
my friend Aaron Rich, thank you for matching my love of random Los Angeles facts and
architectures, and always being down to listen to me complain about the graduate school process.
Thank you to Dina Murokh, whose friendship and love have carried me through the past seven
years. You are the fiercest advocate and kindest soul. My cohort mates and dear friends Danielle
Charlap and Grace Converse made this whole process worth it; we are bonded for life! Thank
you to Linda Essig, who was always ready with sage advice and delicious meals; you helped
make Los Angeles feel like home.
Thank you to the city of San Diego, specifically Kensington, where I wrote at least 50%
of this dissertation in the calming peace of Hilldale Road, watching a hummingbird outside the
window even during the darkest days of the pandemic. To everyone I love in San Diego, you are
my reason for everything. To Jerome Gross, who has taught me how to find inner peace. To
Lauren, Lauren, and Matt, my sisters and brother without whom I don’t make sense. Thank you
to Linda and Curtis for so much support and, more importantly, so many fun dinners on the
porches of Biona and Hart. Thank you to Amy, Adrian, Crowley, Meryl, and Sara for holding me
down with beer and the strongest love. To the Brandleys, Arters, Kulkes, Rodals, Simms, and
Framptons—my 676 family—you are my heart and soul. Thank you to my Aunt Nadine for all
the walks, laughs, and love, and for being my second home my whole life (and to Uncle Chuck,
the only extended family member who is eager to read a 200+ page dissertation). Thank you to
vii
my family I’ve gained through the Solano Canyon Community Garden, for teaching me how to
make things grow at a slower and more gratifying pace.
To the coven—Frances Lazare and Grant Johnson—you are my idols. Grant, you make
Los Angeles and life magical. Frances, who has shaped so much of the arguments of this
dissertation: we have cried, screamed, and done everything together, you have my heart forever.
I cannot wait to see where your brilliance takes you, we’re on this ride together for life. Matt
Gottesfeld shows up for me in big and small ways every day. Thank you for always listening to
my fears, anxieties, hopes, and dreams and showing me love. In the words of Kelsey Ballerini, if
you’re going down I’m going down too.
Thank you to my best friend and sister Ariel Stevenson, with me through everything
since the day I wrote on your Facebook wall in July 2011 that I, too, liked Nicki Minaj, with
whom I moved to Los Angeles and with whom I grew up. I am in awe of your mind and your
soul every day, even if I don’t say so. I am so lucky to have a friendship and love as deep as this.
You’ve taught me how to be a better friend since the first day you asked to borrow my bike. I
will never let you go. And thank you to Phyllis for making her who she is.
I am lucky to have two parents who embody an endless capacity for love. To Edith
Frampton, who has edited everything I’ve ever written since my reports on pandas and beluga
whales, thank you for being my BFF and the source of my imagination. You’ve shown me how
to fly without ever leaving the ground. To Glenn Wade, the most caring and attentive father, who
has shown me how to appreciate the beauty in life’s details, whose daily bird picture texts give
me a reason to have a good day, and who has taught me that the joy in life comes from caring for
others. Finally, thank you to my partner David. What is there to say? You’ve taught me to find
viii
purpose beyond any institution, job, or place. I see you in everything. You give me peace, and
helped me realize that it is what I have sought all along.
ix
Table of Contents
Dedication........................................................................................................................................ii
Acknowledgments..........................................................................................................................iii
List of Figures..................................................................................................................................x
Abstract.........................................................................................................................................xiv
Introduction: Commercial Architectural Photography’s Expanded Field.......................................1
Chapter One: Planning Los Angeles through Architectural Photography: Cities Are for
People (1942).................................................................................................................................46
Chapter Two: Architectural Photography’s Search for a Subject in Arts & Architecture
Magazine, 1940–1967....................................................................................................................92
Chapter Three: Harry Drinkwater and the Limits of Architectural Photography, 1966–69........150
Chapter Four: “Complaints about the Standard Product”: The Los Angeles
Documentary Project (1979-81) and Architectural Photography’s New Identity.......................187
Conclusion: Janna Ireland and the Legacies of Architectural Photography................................238
Bibliography................................................................................................................................ .247
Appendix A: Figures....................................................................................................................267
x
List of Figures
0.1 Case Study House #22, Los Angeles, 1960, photo by Julius Shulman.................................267
0.2 Ed Ruscha, from Some Los Angeles Apartments, 1965.......................................................268
0.3 Julius Shulman, Lytton Savings Bank, 1960.........................................................................2 69
0.4 Ed Ruscha, Jerry McMillan. 1965.........................................................................................2 70
0.5 Julius Shulman, Portrait of Paul R. Williams, 1952..............................................................2 71
0.6 Harry Drinkwater, John H. Smith in Chemosphere house, 1966. ........................................2 72
0.7 Charles Sheeler, Criss-Crossed Conveyors, River Rouge Plant, Ford Motor Company,
1927......................................................................................................................................273
0.8 Julius Shulman, Photographing Architecture and Interiors, p. 54.........................................274
0.9 Romare Bearden, cover of Fortune Magazine, 1968.............................................................275
0.10 Photography by Ed Ruscha, in Steven Izenour, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown,
Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Urban Form, 1972......................276
0.11 Anton Wagner, Beverly Hills, 1932-33...............................................................................277
0.12 Don Normark, Eviction, May 9, 1959.................................................................................278
0.13 Martha Rosler, The Bowery in Two Inadequate Description Systems, 1974-75................279
0.14 Hans Haacke, Shapolsky et al Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time
Social System as of May 1, 1971, 1971................. ................................................................280
0.15 Henry Wessel Jr.,.Los Angeles, 1971...................................................................................281
0.16 Manplan Architectural Review, September 9, 1969............................................................282
1.1 Maynard Parker, Architectural Digest X, no. 9 (1939). ......................................................283
1.2 Alvin Lustig, Cities Are For People: The Los Angeles Region Plans for Living,
1942......................................................................................................................................284
1.3 Photograph by Julius Shulman, Cities are for People, p.2...................................................285
1.4 Cities are for People, p. 21...................................................................................................285
1.5 Julius Shulman for the Haynes Foundation, 1941................................................................286
1.6 Photograph by Julius Shulman, Installation, …And Now We Plan, 1941............................287
1.7 Julius Shulman, Alvin Lustig in his office, 1947-8..............................................................288
1.8 Cities are for People, p. 12...................................................................................................289
1.9 Cities are for People, p. 28...................................................................................................290
1.10 Cities are for People, p. 4....................................................................................................291
1.11 Alfred Stieglitz, New York from the Shelton, 1935............................................................292
1.12 Lisette Model, Window, Bonwit Teller, between 1939 and 7 December 1940..................293
1.13 Installation, Modern Architecture, MoMA, New York, 1932............................................294
1.14 Anton Wagner, Sandwich shop, Wilshire Boulevard, 1932-33..........................................295
1.15 Photograph by Julius Shulman, Cities are for People, p. 46..............................................296
1.16 Photograph by Julius Shulman, Cities are for People, p.51...............................................297
1.17 Photograph by Roger Sturtevant, Arts & Architecture Magazine, December 1943...........298
1.18 Cities are for People, p. 53.................................................................................................299
1.19 Photographs by Julius Shulman, Richard Neutra, “Planning Postwar Fabrication,”
Arts & Architecture, May 1943...........................................................................................300
1.20 Cities are for People, p. 55-56............................................................................................301
1.21 Cities are for People, p. 57-58............................................................................................302
1.22 Cities are for People, p. 59-60............................................................................................303
1.23 Photographs by Julius Shulman, Cities are for People, p. 59-60.......................................304
xi
1.24 …And Now We Plan, exhibition brochure, 1941................................................................305
1.25 Cities are for People, p. 57-58, detail.................................................................................306
1.26 Julius Shulman for the Haynes Foundation, 1941..............................................................307
1.27 Julius Shulman, 1939..........................................................................................................308
1.28 Design by Alvin Lustig, Homes for Heroes cover, 1942....................................................309
1.29 Homes for Heroes, p. 2.......................................................................................................310
1.30 Photograph by Julius Shulman, Homes for Heroes, p. 24-5...............................................311
1.31 Homes for Heroes, p. 39.....................................................................................................312
1.32 Leonard Nadel, Channel Height Project, 1951...................................................................313
1.33 Leonard Nadel, “Pueblo del Rio: The Study of a Planned Community,” p. 8-9................314
1.34 “Pueblo del Rio,” p. 26-27..................................................................................................315
1.35 “Pueblo del Rio,” p. 24-25..................................................................................................316
1.36 “Pueblo del Rio,” p. 34-35..................................................................................................317
1.37 “Pueblo del Rio,” p. 36-37..................................................................................................318
1.38 “Pueblo del Rio,” p. 50-51..................................................................................................319
1.39 “Pueblo del Rio,” p. 94-95..................................................................................................320
1.40 Design by Alvin Lustig, cover of Metropolitan Los Angeles: One Community, 1949.......321
1.41 Julius Shulman, “Case Study House No. 22,” in Arts & Architecture Magazine
(June 1960)..........................................................................................................................322
2.1 Julius Shulman, Raphael Soriano interior, Photographing Architecture and Interiors,
1961.....................................................................................................................................323
2.2 Photograph by William Clarke, California Arts & Architecture (Dec. 1930)....................324
2.3 Alvin Lustig, California Arts & Architecture, February 1942...........................................325
2.4 John Follis, Arts & Architecture, May 1950.......................................................................326
2.5 William Woolett, California Arts & Architecture, (January 1935)....................................327
2.6 Photographs by Julius Shulman, Arts & Architecture (June 1960)....................................328
2.7 Photographs by Dearborn-Massar, Arts & Architecture (April 1956)................................329
2.8 Photograph by Julius Shulman, Arts & Architecture (July 1947).......................................330
2.9 Photograph by Julius Shulman, Arts & Architecture (February 1952)...............................331
2.10 Uncredited photographer, Arts & Architecture (April 1964).............................................332
2.11 Photograph by Marvin Rand, Arts & Architecture (September 1950)...............................333
2.12 Photograph by Edward Weston, California Arts and Architecture (January 1941)..........334
2.13 Photograph by Edward Weston, California Arts and Architecture (September 1941)......335
2.14 Public housing article, Arts & Architecture (May 1943).................................................. ..336
2.15 Public housing article, Arts & Architecture (May 1943)....................................................337
2.16 Photograph by Louis Clyde Stoumen, Arts & Architecture (August 1946).......................338
2.17 Photographs by Jay Connor, Tom Riggs, Arts & Architecture (May 1949)......................339
2.18 Design by Charles Kratka, Arts & Architecture (May 1949)............................................340
2.19 Photograph by Jay Connor, Tom Riggs, Arts & Architecture (May 1949)........................341
2.20 Photograph by Jay Connor, Tom Riggs, Arts & Architecture (May 1949)........................342
2.21 Photographs by James Reed, Arts & Architecture (December 1950)................................343
2.22 Photograph by Julius Shulman, “Glamourized Houses,” Life Magazine,
April 11, 1949, pp. 146-7....................................................................................................344
2.23 Photograph by Julius Shulman, Los Angeles Times Home Magazine, June 15, 1947.......345
2.24 György Kepes, Arts & Architecture (May 1951)...............................................................346
2.25 Photograph by Max Yavno, Arts & Architecture (September 1951).................................347
xii
2.26 Photograph by Max Yavno, Arts & Architecture (September 1951).................................348
2.27 Uncredited photograph, Arts & Architecture (February 1961)..........................................349
2.28 Photograph by Dick Whittington Studio, Arts & Architecture (November 1947).............350
2.29 Photograph by Dick Whittington Studio, Arts & Architecture (November 1947).............351
2.30 Photograph by Dick Whittington Studio, Arts & Architecture (November 1947).............352
2.31 Photographs by Ezra Stoller, Arts & Architecture (March 1955)......................................353
2.32 Photographs by James Reed, Arts & Architecture (July 1951)..........................................354
2.33 Photographs by Marvin Rand, Esther McCoy, Julius Shulman, Arts & Architecture
(October 1963)....................................................................................................................355
2.34 Ed Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966........................................................356
2.35 Ed Ruscha, Jerry McMillan, Lytton Savings Bank,1965...................................................357
3.1 Harry Drinkwater, installation of 66 Signs of Neon, 1966...................................................358
3.2 Harry Drinkwater, John H. Smith interiors, mid-1950s.......................................................359
3.3 Harry Drinkwater, Golden State Mutual Life Insurance building, 1949.............................360
3.4 Harry Drinkwater, John H. Smith. n.d.................................................................................361
3.5 Photograph by Harry Drinkwater, in Garrett Eckbo, Urban Landscape Design (1964).....362
3.6 Photograph by Harry Drinkwater, in Garrett Eckbo, Urban Landscape Design (1964).....363
3.7 Photograph by Harry Drinkwater, cover of Garrett Eckbo, The Landscape We See
(1969)....................................................................................................................................364
3.8 Photograph by Harry Drinkwater, in Garrett Eckbo, Urban Landscape Design (1964)......365
3.9 Photographer unknown, in Noah Purifoy Join for the Arts scrapbook................................366
3.10 Harry Drinkwater, installation of 66 Signs of Neon, 1966..................................................367
3.11 Harry Drinkwater, installation of 66 Signs of Neon, 1966..................................................368
3.12 Photograph by Ezra Stoller, “Family of Man,” 1955..........................................................369
3.13 Photograph by Charles Eames, Mies van der Rohe exhibition...........................................370
3.14 Time Magazine cover, August 20, 1965..............................................................................371
3.15 Harry Drinkwater, installation of 66 Signs of Neon, 1966..................................................372
3.16 Uncredited photograph, installation of 66 Signs of Neon, 1966/67? .................................373
3.17 John Malmin, Los Angeles Times, 1965.............................................................................374
3.18 American Cement Corporation brochure, 1966..................................................................375
3.19 Harry Drinkwater, installation of 66 Signs of Neon, 1966..................................................376
3.20 Harry Drinkwater, installation of 66 Signs of Neon, 1966..................................................377
3.21 Photograph by Harry Drinkwater, Junk Art, 1966..............................................................378
3.22 Photograph by Harry Drinkwater, Junk Art, 1966..............................................................379
3.23 Photograph by Harry Drinkwater, The City by Arthur Secunda, 1966...............................380
3.24 George Fry or John Malmin for Los Angeles Times, 1965.................................................381
3.25 Photograph by Harry Drinkwater, Sunflowers by Debby Brewer, 1966............................382
3.26 Photograph by Harry Drinkwater, Sunflowers by Debby Brewer, in Untitled, 1967.........383
4.1 John Humble, 178th and Manhattan Place, Torrance, 1979...............................................384
4.2 Map, Concept Los Angeles: The Concept of the Los Angeles General Plan, 1974.............385
4.3 Cover of Concept Los Angeles: The Concept of the Los Angeles General Plan, 1974........386
4.4 John Humble, 349 Rose Ave., Venice, 1980.........................................................................387
4.5 Stephen Shore, Hunley Drive, Los Angeles, 6/16/75............................................................388
4.6 The Visual Environment of Los Angeles (1971)...................................................................389
4.7 The Visual Environment of Los Angeles (1971), p. 3...........................................................390
4.8 The New City: Architecture and Urban Renewal, catalogue, 1967......................................391
xiii
4.9 The New City: Architecture and Urban Renewal, exhibition installation, 1967..................392
4.10 Art Sinsabaugh, Chicago Landscape #299, 1966...............................................................393
4.11 The Visual Environment of Los Angeles (1971), p.7..........................................................394
4.12 Douglas Hill, Untitled, 1979...............................................................................................395
4.13 Douglas Hill, Untitled, 1979...............................................................................................396
4.14 Julius Shulman, Richard Neutra’s Kun House, 1936.........................................................397
4.15 Douglas Hill, Untitled, 1980...............................................................................................398
4.16 Douglas Hill, Untitled, 1980...............................................................................................399
4.17 Douglas Hill, Untitled, 1980...............................................................................................400
4.18 Bill Owens, L. A. Freeway, 1980........................................................................................401
4.19 Susan Ressler, Architectural Digest, Los Angeles, 1979....................................................402
4.20 Charles S. White, Architectural Digest, May 1980............................................................403
4.21 Joe Deal, Atlantic Ave. Looking North from Ocean Blvd., 1980........................................404
4.22 Joe Deal, Back Yard, Diamond Bar, CA, 1980...................................................................405
4.23 Joe Deal, Back Yard, Diamond Bar, CA, 1980..................................................................406
4.24 Robbert Flick, Inglewood from Sequential Views, 1980....................................................407
4.25 Gusmano Cesaretti, Untitled, 1979-80...............................................................................408
5.1 Janna Ireland, Golden State Mutual Life Insurance building, 2017.....................................409
5.2 Harry Drinkwater, Golden State Mutual Life Insurance building, 2017..............................410
5.3 Janna Ireland, SeaView, Rancho Palos Verdes, Number 1, 2018.........................................411
5.4 Janna Ireland, Home of Paul R. Williams, n.d......................................................................412
5.5 Janna Ireland, 100 North Delfern Drive, 2019......................................................................413
5.6 Janna Ireland, Golden State Mutual Life Insurance, 2017....................................................414
.
xiv
Abstract
This dissertation demonstrates that commercial architectural photography in Los
Angeles challenged common understandings of both photography’s identity as an art and its
relationship to social critique. During the forty-year period between the late 1930s and the early
1980s—marked on one end by the foundation of the Los Angeles Housing Authority, which
catalyzed a new commitment to public housing, and, on the other, by the city’s bicentennial, an
event that encouraged city officials and the public to reflect on the past—collective anxiety over
the city’s development on large and small scales led to the need for a common language of order
and organization to combat complaints of urban disorder, formlessness, and fragmentation.
Architectural photographers turned in new ways to the technical and formal decisions involved
in making a photograph because they believed the these details could yield a social stance.
Formal order in the photograph, in other words, intimated social order outside the photograph.
Though understudied, commercial architectural photography served as a significant interlocutor
between artists, architects, magazine editors, and urban theorists who shared an interest in
reimagining cities, both conceptually and practically, as a way of bettering the future. Histories
of art and photography have simplified or overlooked the complex social and political
engagements of commercial architectural photography, focusing instead on conceptual art and
fine art photography as those which created a critical photography of architecture. Studying
commercial architectural photography, however, helps expose how twentieth-century
photography trafficked across many ideologies at once, how one picture could serve diametric
purposes depending on its context.
1
Introduction—Commercial Architectural Photography’s Expanded Field
Picture this binary: two men, and two different myths of Los Angeles. The first is
commercial architectural photographer Julius Shulman’s glamorous Los Angeles, seen through
the glossy, expansive windows of a modern home perched on a hillside, looking down at the city
below (fig. 0.1). The second is pop artist Ed Ruscha’s banal Los Angeles, seen as if from within
a car, replete with vernacular architecture, flat expanses of concrete roads, glaring midday
sunlight, and sparse foliage (fig. 0.2). Both visions of the city are photographic were conceived
through photography. Both men have held an outsized role in scholarship, journalism, and
popular lore for creating two seemingly polarized representations of twentieth-century Los
Angeles. Yet sometimes they photographed the same buildings, and sometimes those
photographs look remarkably similar.
A case in point is two photographs of the Lytton Savings Bank on Sunset Boulevard on
Los Angeles’s iconic Sunset Boulevard (figs. 0.3 & 0.4). Both are shot from across the street and
to the west of the building from oblique angles that highlight the structure’s three dimensionality
and signature zig zag roofline, a detail that indelibly associates its style with midcentury modern
design. Figure 3 has perfected certain formal deficiencies visible in Figure 4: less road in the
foreground places more focus on the architecture, a corrected exposure gives richer contrasts,
and the roofline is made parallel to the photographic frame. How do these formal differences
affect the overall comparison of these two photographs and their purposes?
The two photographs are from entirely different projects. The architectural firm Hagman
& Meyer commissioned Shulman to photograph the first in 1960, for promotional material. By
contrast, artist Jerry McMillan shot the second photograph in 1965. Ruscha, McMillan’s friend,
commissioned him to photograph Sunset Boulevard. The artists were experimenting with how to
2
photograph every building on the Sunset Strip for a book project, which led to the eponymously
named Every Building on Sunset Strip (1966). This followed Ruscha’s artist book of the previous
year, Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965), which included pages of casual snapshots of
unremarkable apartment façades. My dissertation begins with this Shulman-Ruscha dyad to tease
out the stakes of their shared subject matter and formal differences. I ask how photographs of
architecture, made by supposedly dissimilar fine artists and commercial photographers, came to
serve the same role as portraits of Los Angeles.
“Exposing Urban Form: Commercial Architectural Photography in Los Angeles, 1938–
1981” demonstrates that commercial architectural photography challenged common
understandings of both photography’s identity as an art and its relationship to social critique; its
photographers did so by using Los Angeles as a subject. During the forty-year period between
the late 1930s and the early 1980s—marked on one end by the foundation of the Los Angeles
Housing Authority, which catalyzed a new commitment to public housing and, on the other, by
the city’s bicentennial, an event that encouraged city officials and the public to reflect on the
past—collective anxiety over the city’s development on large and small scales led to the need for
a common language of order and organization to combat complaints of urban disorder,
formlessness, and fragmentation. Though understudied, commercial architectural photography
served as a significant interlocutor between artists, architects, magazine editors, and urban
theorists who shared an interest in reimagining cities, both conceptually and practically, as a way
of bettering the future.
Studying commercial architectural photography from this period gives insight into how
the technical decisions that arise in the process of making a photograph—composition, exposure,
lighting, and framing—took on an elevated prominence because of how they affected
3
photography’s social meaning. Commercial architectural photography, my dissertation argues,
modeled how to resolve tensions in the process of urban growth—such as increasing racial,
spatial, and economic segregation—by managing buildings and urban landscapes through
orderly and organized composition. Formal order defined how at the level of the photograph, in
other words, intimated social order. Under these conditions, the agency of the architecture
pictured was unclear: did it matter how well a particular architectural or design project
contributed to eradicating social problems affecting the city? Or did it only matter how it
photographed? Diverging from perspectives that have prioritized the architectural subject as that
which dictates architectural photography’s meaning, my dissertation accounts for its stakes
through photography.
The rise of artists and art photographers in the 1960s and 70s who photographed
buildings as a means of critiquing or exposing the problems of cities has held an uneasy place in
scholarship. Scholars have disagreed about whether such endeavors are considered important for
their subject matter or, rather, for their artists’ experimentation with image and photographic
form. They have not looked to a broader field of commercial photography for answers to this
polemic.
1
By closely evaluating how architectural photographers approached photography and its
printed contexts—including municipal pamphlets, avant-garde magazines, and exhibition
catalogues—my dissertation provides a prehistory to this era of art photography. I show that
commercial photography influenced how these artists and art photographers envisioned the
1
Two accounts get close: Britt Salvesen and Jason Hill connect photographers Henry Wessel and John Divola,
respectively, to antecedent representations of commercial architectural photography, but frame the latter as a foil to
the more engaged, critical practices of Wessel and Divola without considering the formal and social continuities.
Jason Hill, “Noise Abatement Zone: John Divola's Photographic Fulcrum,” in Jordan Bear and Kate Palmer Albers,
Before and After Photography: Histories and Contexts (New York: Routledge, 2017); Britt Salvesen, “‘Real Estate
Opportunities’: Commercial Photography as Conceptual Source in New Topographics, in Reframing New
Topographics, Greg Foster-Rice, John Rohrback, eds. (Chicago: Center for American Places at Columbia College
Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2010), 71-85.
4
relationship between photographic form and social critique. Architectural photography, I
suggest, reveals how formal technique, rather than subject matter or content, took on an outsized
role in conveying the social and political stakes of urban development and urban crisis. Through
their work about Los Angeles, commercial architectural photographers catalyzed a new approach
to urban subjects, one anchored in a desire to transform and provide formal order. As such, the
genre turned photographers, theorists, and scholars towards key questions concerning the nature
of the medium: could photography influence the social problems affecting cities? More
generally, could photography intervene in its subject matter?
The Profession
Architecture served as an ideal subject for nineteenth-century photography because it
stood still, accommodating the long exposure times necessary for early camera technology. It
also trafficked between photography’s publicized identities, between those advocating for its
status as a scientific tool and those positioning it as an artistic spectacle. As architectural
historian Claire Zimmerman has stated, both photography and architecture could function as
“mythmaking sign as well as scientific artifact.”
2
Since the rise of commercial photography
studios in the mid-nineteenth century, architectural assignments have pervaded documentary,
advertising, and preservation projects.
3
Several firms in England and France began to specialize
2
Claire Zimmerman, Photographic Architecture in the Twentieth Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2014), 4.
3
For nineteenth-century histories of commercial photography and commercial architectural photography, see Peter
Barberie, “Charles Marville’s Seriality,” in More Than One: Photographs in Sequence, Joel Smith, ed. (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 31-46; Malcolm Daniel, ed. The Photographs of Édouard Baldus (New
York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1994);
Helmut Gernsheim, Focus on Architecture and Sculpture: An Original Approach to the Photography of Architecture
and Sculpture (London: Fountain Press, 1949); Anne McCauley, Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in
Paris, 1848-1871 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Micheline Nilsen, ed. Nineteenth-Century
Photographs and Architecture: Documenting History, Charting Progress, and Exploring the World (Burlington,
VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2013).
5
solely in architectural photography by the end of the nineteenth century.
4
In Los Angeles,
however, it was not until the 1930s that any commercial photographers marketed themselves
exclusively as architectural photographers.
5
Like court painters of the seventeenth century, architectural photographers captured the
culture of an elite coterie who shared a desire to influence the future appearance of Los Angeles.
In the 1920s, several European architects relocated to the city, most notably Rudolph Schindler
and Richard Neutra. Neutra, who became the most celebrated and influential modern architect in
Los Angeles and Julius Shulman’s most important client, brought to the U.S. his desire to design
large-scale housing for workers, believing in the importance of high-quality socialized,
subsidized homes.
6
It was not only modern architects who solicited commercial architectural
photographers for new projects with social purposes, however; editors, social scientists studying
urban contexts, and city planners began publishing magazines and books in the early 1940s
illustrated primarily with architectural photography. Even as more photographers established
themselves professionally as architectural photographers, their assignments were not limited to
taking exterior and interior building shots. Freelance commercial architectural photographers in
Los Angeles could expect assignments shooting industrial design, urban landscape design,
sculptures, art exhibitions, portraits of architects, and street scenes.
These professionals, most of whom travelled in similar social circles and crossed paths on
different jobs, aligned with progressive, liberal democratic causes. While generally against racial
segregation, they did not openly contest community displacement caused by pernicious forces
4
Robert Elwall, Photography takes Command: The Camera and British Architecture, 1890-1939 (London: RIBA
Heinz Gallery, 1994).
5
For more on the early history of commercial photography in Los Angeles, see Jennifer Watts, “Picture Taking in
Paradise: Los Angeles and the Creation of Regional Identity, 1880-1920” History of Photography 24, no. 3 (2000):
243-250.
6
Thomas Hine, Architecture of the Sun: Los Angeles Modernism, 1900-1970 (New York: Rizzoli, 2010), 407.
6
such as urban renewal projects. Not only did architectural photographers document buildings,
sculptures, and exhibition installations, they also created portraits of the professionals
themselves, as when Shulman photographed architect Paul Revere Williams showing off a
building model on his desk, a framed watercolor drawing of a building in the background (fig.
0.5), or when Harry Drinkwater photographed designer John H. Smith sitting and staring directly
at the camera in architect John Lautner’s Chemosphere house, for which Smith did the interior
design (fig. 0.6). A self-referentiality thus pervaded the field: architectural photographers
documented the culture of creative Los Angeles, from its products to its people.
In the 1940s, the profession further gained strength in the United States, which coincided
with new professional avenues in other areas of photography, notably the foundation of the
photojournalist collective Magnum Photos in 1947. Also established in 1947, the Architectural
Photographers Association, of which Shulman was a vice president, aimed to make the
profession known in various industries and to help settle payment disputes that often arose with
architects and magazine editors who refused to pay appropriate wages to photographers, seeing
the latter as replaceable labor. As APA President Lionel Freedman remarked in 1956, “the idea
that architectural photography has no appreciable intrinsic value except as a steppingstone to
other more lucrative (and generally quite nebulous) fields is essentially ridiculous.”
7
Freedman
and others advocated that photographing architecture, design, and interior spaces required skills
distinct from those required in other commercial photographic fields.
Camera technology has had significant influence on the style of architectural
photography, as Claire Zimmerman has charted. Professional architectural photographers
generally relied on large-format cameras placed on tripods for stability. In the early 1940s,
7
Architectural Photographers Association Bulletin, 9, no. 5 (May 1956): n.p. Maynard Parker Negatives,
Photographs, and Other Material, The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.
7
several companies introduced technology that allowed photographers to adjust the focal lengths
of their cameras on site and to adjust the lens of the camera independently from its base, which
held the negative being exposed.
8
The latter innovation mattered particularly to architectural
photographers: the camera lens could be brought in parallel with the building surfaces being
shot, leading to less perspectival and angular distortion, especially with tall buildings. This led to
increasingly uniform compositions, and a desire especially within American commercial
architectural photography to maintain this so-called “regime of standard perspective,” avoiding
experimental angles of earlier European architectural photography.
9
Commercial architectural photography has been associated with two contradictory
generalizations concerning its style and purpose. It connotes technical photographs
commissioned by architecture or construction firms whose primary purpose is to document
structures rather than to showcase photographic mastery. Yet it also recalls beautiful photographs
featured in architecture, design, and shelter magazines, which convey aspirational lifestyles
rather than particular details of architectural or spatial design. Paradigmatic of this bifurcation is
the cultural reception of Shulman’s photograph of Case Study House no. 22 (1960), architect
Pierre Koenig’s contribution to the modernist building project sponsored by Arts & Architecture
magazine (fig. 0.1). Recognized for delivering the feeling of an aspirational midcentury modern
lifestyle, the photograph received its most recent accolade from TIME Magazine, being named
among the top one hundred most influential photographs of all time, which editors deemed the
8
Zimmerman, Photographic Architecture, 221.
9
Zimmerman argues that these experimental, angled photographs became more common in “art” photography of the
period in the United States. Zimmerman, ibid., 223. It is also worth mentioning that the architectural photography of
German photographers such as Albert Renger-Patzsch has been celebrated because it seems more aligned with larger
social issues. Michael Jennings has argued that Renger-Patzsch’s photographs conveyed support for the
technologized industry and modernity in cities during the Weimar Republic. Michael Jennings, “Agriculture,
Industry, and the Birth of the Photo-Essay in the Late Weimar Republic,” October 93 (Summer 2000): 23–56.
8
“most successful real estate image ever taken.”
10
Yet as art historian Susanna Phillips Newbury
has recently pointed out, Shulman’s photograph, shot for Arts & Architecture Magazine, was
never featured in the issue that debuted the project.
11
Its editor instead featured a photograph
from a similar angle that better showcased the architectural achievement of hillside building, a
photograph decidedly less glamorous and more informational, in service of the architecture and
structural integrity of the building (fig. 0.8). Thus, even at the apex of the mania for modernist
architectural photography and the glamorous living in Los Angeles that it conveyed, architectural
photographers produced both sensational photographs and photographs whose main purpose was
to document and to convey information . Even though these were not seen as contradictory
purposes, secondary scholarship has selectively chosen mostly the iconic, glamorous
photographs to represent the genre. My dissertation restores the heterogeneity of photographs
taken by commercial architectural photographers, contending that the genre could not have
ascended to its cultural status without the diverse assignments undertaken and photographs
produced.
Circulation and Reputation
By the early 1900s, many magazines had included halftone illustrations of photographs,
as the process had been patented in the 1880s.
12
In Southern California, The California Architect
and Building News published its first issue in 1880, and by the 1920s, magazines featuring
10
Lyra Kilston, “Julius Shulman: Photography's Master of Mid-Century Modern,” TIME Magazine, September 29,
2011, https://time.com/3781381/julius-shulman-photographys-master-of-mid-century-modern/. For more on
Shulman’s construction of a midcentury aesthetic, see Dianne Harris, “Case Study Utopia and Architectural
Photography,” American Art 25, no.2 (Summer 2011): 18–20.
11
Susanna Phillips Newbury, The Speculative City: Art, Real Estate, and the Making of Global Los Angeles
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021), 124.
12
Richard Benson, The Printed Picture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008); Dusan C. Stulik, Halftone: The
Atlas of Analytical Signatures of Photographic Processes (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2013).
9
architecture and design proliferated.
13
Until the 1930s, architecture in Los Angeles was
dominated by revivalist styles, Spanish Colonial chief among them. Through photography,
magazines including Architectural Digest, Sunset Magazine, Good Housekeeping, and Southwest
Builder & Contractor elevated the luxurious revival mansions built throughout the region, which
aligned with long-held booster advertising rhetoric that positioned Los Angeles as the temperate
land of oranges, red roof tiles, and easy living.
14
These photographs, focused on selling the
houses and lifestyles, created formal paradigms that younger architectural photographers taking
on modern clients emulated. Photographers did not reject the flattering angles, perspectives, and
spatial dynamics evoked in the photographs populating the pages of magazines such as
Architectural Digest. Instead, they adapted those techniques to sell the modern and its adjacent
ideologies.
Architectural photography circulated most widely and prominently through national and
international magazines devoted both to architecture as a trade and to lifestyles, design, and
homemaking. Such publications supported myriad professional photographers and created a
bedrock of architectural photography that by and large defined the formal standards of the genre
and perpetuated architectural photography’s glamorous reputation, endemic to the pages of elite,
glossy magazines.
15
It did not only circulate in magazines, however. My dissertation looks to
publications outside of the mainstream, some of which barely circulated beyond Los Angeles.
Because of their smaller influence and lack of rigid editorial standards, their creators
13
For more on the history of Los Angeles magazines and periodicals, see Mitchell Schwarzer, “Architectural
Magazines in California,” arcCA 4, no. 1 (2004), accessed November 2022, http://arccadigest.org/architectural-
magazines-california/.
14
William F. Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Phoebe S. Kropp, California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a
Modern American Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
15
By “glossy,” the architect refers to the particular method of printing on high quality, glossy art paper, a choice that
goes back to nineteenth-century British magazines. The term glossy often serves as a metonym for a magazine’s
cultural status as serving wealthy, elite audiences.
10
experimented with architectural photography. They used it as a visual tool through which to
contend with—sometimes to support, reject, and express ambivalence toward—the complex and
at times violent roles that architecture and urban development played in Los Angeles. More often
than not, architectural photography was used to convey a stable image of the complexities of Los
Angeles as a whole, applicable to the needs of diverse thinkers taking on city planning and urban
futures. Studying these projects uncovers how, at the height of its promotion of modernism,
domesticity, and wartime and postwar living, commercial architectural photography was also
involved in controversial discourse about how to project urban spatial and social order. While
these projects may not have succeeded in altering the course of the city’s development, they
established important new directions for photography, provoking questions about how
photographs frame their subject matter to produce meaning.
Yet architectural photography often unearthed the very tensions of representation and
meaning it was meant to resolve. It trafficked in a complex array of its clients’ social and
political investments. The dearth of social documentary photography made in or about Los
Angeles, moreover, meant that there was no dominant urban iconography relevant to local
problems to which architectural photographers responded. Instead, they created their own, thanks
to certain clients with unconventional ideas. Architectural photography filled a gap: it became
the socially engaged photography of Los Angeles and, in so doing, set a precedent for the visual
exclusion of many of the city’s most pressing problems.
Architectural Photographers, in their Own Words
Much of what we know about the field of architectural photography comes from writings
by the professionals themselves. Over many decades, architectural photographers developed a
standardized approach to composition, lighting, and photography in general so as to present—
11
and sell—architecture and interiors in the most flattering way. Adding to a growing body of
midcentury literature aimed at teaching the public about taking photos, Los Angeles-based
photographer Robert Cleveland published a how-to manual about architectural photography
titled Architectural Photography of Houses: How to Take Good Pictures of Exteriors and
Interiors (1953), celebrated as the first book of its kind.
16
Geared towards both amateurs and
aspiring professionals, the book included detailed information about camera selection, film
choice, angles, lens tilts, and requirements for particular rooms and exteriors. While architectural
photographs may “lack the excitement of a news picture or the photograph of a pretty girl in an
ad,” Cleveland conceded, there was nonetheless “great appeal if the scene is properly
depicted.”
17
The book was heavily illustrated with photographs, often showing two photographs
of the same room to demonstrate successful and problematic approaches, such as when
Cleveland showed how “slight movement” of the camera resulted in telling the story of the
architecture better. Cleveland distinguished the pictures he took as “house portraiture,” which
captured the mood and the character of architecture.
18
He also argued that architectural
photography could have “sociological significance,” because they could help “raise the standard
of living.”
19
While Cleveland’s book created a bedrock of images to which young architectural
photographers could refer in honing their skill, it was not until the publication of Shulman’s
16
Architectural Record, which published the book, advertised the book as such. While books existed that
highlighted architectural photography, their focus was on the architecture rather than on teaching the skill of
photography. Artistic Houses, being a series of Interior Views of a number of the Most Beautiful and Celebrated
Homes in the United States (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1883). An article in the Journal of the Society
of Architects focused on teaching architectural photography. “Architectural Photography,” Journal of the Society of
Architects 3, 27 (January 1910): 109-113. European precedents to Cleveland’s book exist, see Claire Zimmerman,
Photographic Architecture.
17
Robert Cleveland, Architectural Photography of Houses: How to Take Good Pictures of Exteriors and Interiors
(New York: F.W. Dodge Corporation, Architectural Record, 1953), 3.
18
Ibid, 8.
19
Ibid, 4.
12
Photographing Architecture and Interiors (1962) that a photographer widely publicized the
theoretical and ideological tenets of the profession. Shulman became a skilled self-promoter and
fierce advocate for professional photographers, at times at the expense of his relationship with
some of his most trusted architectural clients.
20
He would go on to author or co-author at least six
books on architectural photography, and he credited his books as that which made his career
skyrocket.
21
In his first publication, he advised young professionals on how to establish their
businesses, how to go about marketing themselves, and how to navigate retaining rights to their
photographs and negatives in different contexts. Shulman befriended many magazine editors
throughout his career, keeping up active correspondences with them and charting whether or not
they properly gave him credit when his photographs were published.
22
Through their
publications, Cleveland and Shulman outlined what it meant to be an architectural photographer,
and established the breadth and skill necessary to succeed.
Part how-to manual and part treatise, Shulman’s first book elaborates like Cleveland’s on
the formal choices and insider technical decisions made during the process of choosing a camera,
setting up a scene, taking a photograph, and doing extensive manipulations in the darkroom that
could dramatically alter the photography’s overall effect. The book begins by rehearsing the oft-
repeated dual purposes of photography as both a fine art and as a medium of communication.
Shulman cites architectural photography as primarily concerned with the latter purpose: “A
20
Later in his life, architect Richard Neutra, one of Shulman’s closest friends and his most important client, became
distraught over Shulman’s behavior on photoshoots. He thought that Shulman was only photographing sites for his
own benefit, ignoring the wishes and recommendations of Neutra. Neutra’s wife, Dione, wrote to Shulman to relay
this. Box 1978, folder 2, Richard and Dion Neutra Papers, 1925-1970, Collection 1179, University of California,
Los Angeles, Charles E. Young Library.
21
Peter Gössel, Julius Shulman, Julius Shulman: Architecture and its Photography (Köln: Taschen, 1998).
22
Shulman was good friends with Architectural Forum editor Douglas Haskell. The two men traded ideas about
architects to feature in the magazine, layout ideas, and developments in the profession. Boxes 8, 16:5-16:6, Douglas
Putnam Haskell papers, 1866-1979-(bulk 1949-1964), Columbia University Libraries, 3463720.
13
photographer must remember that he is not doing a class exercise in artistic photography,”
Shulman advises, urging young photographers not to stray into the “siren regions of art
photography.”
23
Indeed, Shulman worked hard to distance architectural photography from what
he described as a “stylized approach to photography,” which he thought made photographs look
dated. Too “atmospheric” of a style, which he associated with pictorialist photography of the
1920s, distracted from the structure of a building.
24
Yet Shulman did believe that architectural
photography could “transcend the mere physical recording” by evoking “empathy,” giving it a
creativity and freedom that transformed it into a work of art. Its art status, however, was
determined by careful control of the formal decisions.
The majority of the book is comprised of Shulman’s formal analyses of his own
photographs. On page 54 (fig. 0.7), Shulman argues that the top photograph is “sharp and
formal, but leaves the viewer with a need for more information.” The bottom, preferred
photograph, by contrast, adds dimensions, allowing the rectangular form of the building to be
retained while making the roof “understandable,” conveying the information the top photo has
not.
25
Subtle shifts in photographic composition thus became loaded with meaning. These pages
dramatize how Shulman and other architectural photographers were actively negotiating the way
precise formal gestures significantly altered how a building appeared, but this meaning was still
mutable from photograph to photograph. More importantly, however, both photographs serve a
purpose in Shulman’s book: published in equal size throughout, these comparisons form the core
of his study, and the imperfect photograph serves to train readers to recognize what a “good”
architectural photograph looks like. In other words, the entire process of architectural
23
Julius Shulman, Photographing Architecture and Interiors (New York: Whitney Publications, 1962), 2.
24
Boxes 8, 16:5-16:6, Douglas Putnam Haskell papers, 1866-1979-(bulk 1949-1964), Columbia University
Libraries, 3463720.
25
Shulman, Photographing Architecture and Interiors, 54.
14
photography, from test shots to imperfect shots to selecting the final photographs for a project,
deserve equal visibility and consideration in Shulman’s didactic text, which ultimately serves to
strengthen the photographer’s final shot selection, insinuating it was Shulman who could
determine the best shot(s) of many.
British commercial architectural photographer Eric de Maré further elucidates the range
of purposes that the genre encompassed at midcentury in his book Photography and Architecture
(1961). De Maré divides architectural photography into three categories that he admits overlap:
‘the record,’ ‘the illustration,’ and ‘the picture.’ Unlike the first two categories, which he
considers documentary and informative with varying degrees of formal appeal, the latter is “not
concerned at all with the record but attempts to create a work of visual art…the subject may, or
may not, have architectural value in itself; it is the picture which matters.”
26
De Maré’s primary
concern in the book and clear personal preference is in this category of the picture. For de Maré,
the genre at its most creative is not concerned with one type of subject matter. While this might
seem like a way for de Maré to perpetuate distinctions between commercial architectural
photography and art photography of architecture, de Maré insists that photography’s status as an
art derives from its commercial and popular uses. In this regard, he singles out photojournalism,
which he calls “true works of art which millions who have never been in an art gallery in their
lives have enjoyed.”
27
Like Shulman, de Maré expands on a philosophy of image making that focuses on the
relationship of form to subject. Like many postwar photographers, de Maré argues that
photographers must appeal to a sense of humanism: a sense of subjective, human experience in
26
Eric de Maré, Photography and Architecture (London: The Architectural Press, 1961), 26.
27
Ibid, 27.
15
the world.
28
Photographers can do so, de Maré contends, without needing to depict people or
represent human stories; they can do so through abstraction and a focus on architectural form.
For de Maré, photography gives form, and thus an affective humanistic appeal, to the content, or
subject, that is architecture. Although he insists, quoting photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson,
that form should not be separated from content, ultimately de Maré deemphasizes the importance
of subject matter, and celebrates photographic form for its abstract attention to line, tone, texture,
and pattern, which help to organize the “meaningless disorder of the outer world.”
29
For
Shulman, de Maré, and others, photography had an impact on the world precisely because it was
not photojournalism or documentary photography; it could transform the “disorder” of the world
on a more metaphysical level, allowing viewers to see their surroundings differently through
both buildings and abstract form.
Categorizing Architectural Photography
Writers, collectors, and editors have pulled architectural photography in different
directions, claiming it for various purposes of historical narrative. In his Focus on Architecture
and Sculpture (1949), Helmut Gernsheim continued a nineteenth-century trend of grouping
together photography of architecture with photography of sculpture, suggesting that if a
photographer is a specialist in one, he ought to specialize in both.
30
A special issue in Aperture
on architectural photography (1958) made one of the best cases for it as a fine art form. With
examples from the nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, the issue integrated the work
28
For more on the subjective “turn” in postwar photography, see Eric Mortenson, “The Ghost of Humanism:
Rethinking the Subjective Turn in Postwar American Photography,” History of Photography 38, 4 (November
2014): 418-434.
29
Eric de Maré, Photography and Architecture, 23.
30
Helmut Gernsheim, Focus on Architecture and Sculpture: An Original Approach to the Photography of
Architecture and Sculpture (London: Fountain Press, 1949). For more on the relationship between photography of
architecture and photography of sculpture, see Sarah Hamill and Megan Luke, eds., Photography and Sculpture: The
Art Object in Reproduction (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute Publications, 2017).
16
of Alfred Stieglitz with that of Aaron Siskind, Lewis Hine, and Morley Baer, a lesser-known
commercial architectural photographer working in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
31
The issue,
however, tries to reclaim commercial work from its original contexts, finding hidden art in its
finest examples rather than examining the true range and texture of commercial work. Surveys
on the genre by Robert Elwall and Cervin Robinson have been organized stylistically,
progressing through various technological innovations and connecting them to aesthetic change,
but these authors have been less interested in connecting the genre to broader themes concerning
art’s histories and its participation in culture.
32
Indeed, existing writing on architectural photography highlights the way scholars and
curators have had trouble categorizing and resolving photography’s myriad purposes more
generally; for instance, how concerns over technical mastery and aesthetics relate to, as art
historian Anthony Lee phrases it, the “ghost of social consciousness looming at the margins of
the documentary.”
33
Architectural photography rose as a distinct commercial field not because it
necessarily provided a solution for the dilemma between the social, technical, and aesthetic, but
because its photographers, and the editors, architects, and professionals who used it, reworked
such questions through associating architectural photographs with progressive social causes and
with consumerism, all while the photographs were still carefully attuned to aesthetic and form.
Nonetheless commercial architectural photography has remained an understudied genre,
narrowly associated with photography made for advertising or public relations purposes.
Histories of art and photography have continually siloed not only commercial architectural
31
“Substance and Spirit of Architectural Photography (Special Issue),” Aperture 6, no. 4 (1958): 143-182.
32
Robert Elwall, Building with Light: The International History of Architectural Photography (London: Merrell
Publishers, 2004); Cervin Robinson and Joel Hershman, Architecture Transformed: A History of the Photography of
Buildings (Cambridge, MA, New York: The MIT Press, Architectural League of New York, 1987).
33
Anthony Lee, “American Histories of Photography,” American Art 21, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 6.
17
photography, but commercial photography broadly, as a technical or purely illustrative genre
serving corporate clients, or else as a foil or counterpoint to other, more artistically and critically
engaged practices. From one perspective, any photography or art that has been commissioned or
sold for money is commercial, but the dividing lines between practices considered “commercial”
versus “artistic” have had lasting implications for the fields and how they have been categorized.
The history of photography, and the historiography of photography, are marked by contradictory
categorizations and genres imposed to discipline meaning, what Abigail Solomon-Godeau has
termed the “genre-fication” of the medium.
34
Midcentury commercial architectural photography
gives insight into the genres that altered photography’s social and political meaning. I reconsider,
furthermore, what factors have contributed to one type of photography being categorized as more
socially concerned than another.
The exclusion of commercial architectural photography from conventional narratives of
photographic history has contributed to the gatekeeping of what kinds of photography are
considered as art. The genre is often considered in opposition to artists who photograph
architecture, instead thought of as an applied art.
35
Andrew Higgott and Timothy Wray’s
estimation is exemplary in their argument that commercial architectural photography positions
architecture as its “largely autonomous primary source,” whereas art practices that represent
architecture situate their photography in social and cultural contexts and take on “wide-ranging”
subjects.
36
Implicit in this split is the belief that artist-photographers, or art photographers, adopt
a creative approach towards architectural representation, whereas commercial practitioners leave
34
Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography after Photography: Gender, Genre, History (Duke and London: Duke
University Press, 2017), 2.
35
Richard Neutra, “The Photographer and Architect,” in Julius Shulman, Photographing Architecture and Interiors
(New York: Whitney Publications, 1962), vii; Robert A. Sobieszek, The Architectural Photography of Hedrich-
Blessing (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984).
36
Andrew Higgott, Timothy Wray, eds. Camera Constructs: Photography, Architecture, and the Modern City
(London: Routledge, 2012), 12.
18
little room for experimentation and instead are bound, as they put it, to a “defined discourse”
because of the nature of their commissions and clients.
These contrived distinctions extend the legacy of how photography was institutionalized
as a fine art in the twentieth century. Curator John Szarkowski, who proffered modernist
narratives inherited about photography that prioritized its aesthetic meaning over its contexts and
varied uses in the 1960s, published a book of architectural photography in the 1950s before he
became head of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in
1962. In the introduction to an edition of Szarkowski’s The Idea of Louis Sullivan (1956),
Terence Riley argued that the curator’s photographs of Sullivan’s architecture make clear the
differences between “architectural photography as a profession” and “the photography of
architecture as an art practice.”
37
“The profession of architectural photographer certainly still
exists today,” Riley clarifies, pejoratively describing the profession as providing clients with
photographs “that strive for an ineluctable anonymity and follow a certain stylistic pattern of
bright daylit exterior shots and interiors evenly lit by artificial sources.” Paradoxically, Riley
concludes by arguing that Szarkowski’s photographs in fact do not further the distinctions but
rather “bridge the gap between the photographer as artist and the architectural photographer as
technician,”
38
thus betraying ambivalence about his own hypothesis. Riley’s remarks reify the
notion that the field of commercial architectural photography, undertaken by professional
architectural photographers, prioritizes technical acuity over artistry, and is concerned primarily
with standardized, anonymous imagery in need of redemption by a photographer who
understands the art of the medium.
37
Terence Riley, “Introduction,” in John Szarkowski, The Idea of Louis Sullivan (Boston: Bulfinch Press, 2000)
[1956], xv.
38
Ibid.
19
Another consequence of the genre’s isolation is that when scholars have engaged with
commercial photography, many analyses have highlighted the pejorative, uncovering how the
rhetoric of its imagery has contributed to nefarious cultural codes of capitalism.
39
Many conflate
it with real estate photography, often taken by unskilled or untrained real estate agents that
circulated widely in brochures. Architectural photography has been an especially easy target
because of its participation in campaigns to transform the landscape of American domesticity
through building single-family homes and suburbs in the 1950s. Scholars such as Dianne Harris
have made the argument that certain architectural photographs—in her study, photographs used
to advertise model homes built by the U.S. Gypsum Company—“powerfully (if perhaps subtly)
contributed to the structures that permitted and enforced housing segregation, from the FHA’s
redlining practices, to the many political forces that existed in the Jim Crow Era.”
40
By restoring
to commercial architectural photography the myriad connections and relationships that made it
into the diverse field it was in this period, my dissertation builds upon a body of scholarship that
has excavated nuanced histories of commercial photography and its intersections with histories
of art, advertising, and modernism.
41
Photography historians Tina Campt and Nicole Fleetwood
39
Roland Barthes, “The Rhetoric of the Image,” Communications, 4 (1964): 40-51; Susan Sontag, “In Plato’s
Cave,” in On Photography (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1973), 1–19; Allan Sekula, “Photography between
Labour and Capital,” in Mining Photographs and other Pictures, 1948–1968, ed. Benjamin HD Buchloh and Robert
Wilkie (Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983), 193-268; For scholarship that
further investigates the visual cultures of capitalism, including of that of corporations and the advertising world, see
Elspeth Brown, The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884-
1929 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); David Campany, Walker Evans: The Magazine Work
(Göttingen: Steidl, 2014); Patricia Johnston, Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen’s Advertising Photography
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way
for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
40
Dianne Harris, “Modeling Race and Class: Architectural Photography and the U.S. Gypsum Research Village,
1952–1955,” in Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present) eds. Irene
Cheng, Charles L. Davis III, Mabel O. Wilson (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), 218-240.
41
Elspeth Brown, The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884-
1929 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005) Katherine A. Bussard, Kristen Gresh, eds. Life Magazine
and the Power of Photography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2020); Jason Hill, Artist as
Reporter: Weegee, Ad Reinhardt, and the PM News Picture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018); Sally
Stein, “The Rhetoric of the Colorful and the Colorless: American Photography and Material Culture Between the
Wars,” Ph.D. Diss. Yale University, 1991.
20
have in recent years turned to archives of vernacular and commercial photographic portraiture to
locate resistance to dominant codes of racial representation; my dissertation asserts that studying
even more mainstream commercial photography can likewise expand understanding of how
different categories of photography produced and resisted dominant codes of representation.
42
The criticism of commercial architectural photography has its roots in midcentury
writers. During the four-decade period covered by this dissertation, numerous architects and
photographers rhetorically positioned commercial architectural photography as a strawman
against which they could define a more critical mode of architectural photography and
architectural practice.
43
Eric De Maré quoted one such account in his 1960 book, that of architect
Sir William Holford, who warned of the “tyranny of the glossy photography” that was imposed
upon the profession of architecture, perpetuating a long-held bias that architects held against
photography as an architectural tool.
44
By the 1970s, the critiques took on politics. Writers were
dissatisfied with photography that seemed to ignore the social problems and responsibilities
facing architecture and urban studies. In 1979, writer Tom Picton complained that architectural
photographs provided dangerous idealizations of its subjects, with damaging effects on viewers’
sense of reality: “Remember those official pictures of Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini? We
photograph buildings in the same way.”
45
42
Tina Campt, Listening to Images (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017); Nicole Fleetwood, Troubling Vision:
Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
43
There was also a perpetual bias against architects who photographed as opposed to those who sketched, a criticism
waged at Denise Scott-Brown with particular misogynistic implications. Elizabeth Greenspan, “Denise Scott
Brown’s Wayward Eye,” Architect Magazine, September 7, 2018:
https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/denise-scott-browns-wayward-eye_o.
44
By “glossy,” the architect refers to the particular method of printing on high quality, glossy art paper, a choice that
goes back to nineteenth-century British magazines. The term glossy often serves as a metonym for a magazine’s
cultural status as serving wealthy, elite audiences. Quotation by Sir William Holford, excerpted in Eric de Maré,
Photography and Architecture (London: The Architectural Press, 1961), 18.
45
Ibid.
21
Likewise, photographer Cervin Robinson wrote in 1975 that the feeling of dissatisfaction
in photography he felt pervaded in professional circles did not concern commercial architectural
photographers’ lack of skill but, rather, their skill “misapplied.”
46
Most disturbing to Robinson
was a trend that also concerned modernist critics and curators defending photography as a
distinct art medium. Robinson feared that it had become impossible to distinguish the
photographer’s perspective from the architect’s; photographers had been relegated to be
architects’ spokespeople, rather than critical eyes representing a project faithfully for both its
good and its bad. As such, commercial architectural photography furthered debates about the
medium of photography that became prevalent in the 1980s: perhaps it could not function
autonomously, but only depend on the subjects represented for its meaning.
47
As developers
speculated on land and built cheap, sprawling, environmentally degrading suburbs while cities
suffered from urban blight and depopulation as a result of residents moving to suburbs, critics
argued architectural photography ought to carry a particular responsibility to expose and critique
such dominant forces of capitalism, rather than serve as a handmaid to real estate interests and
capitalism. Under such attacks, writers such as Picton and Robinson narrowly chose examples
that served their purpose, disregarding the heterogeneity of work produced by certain
architectural photographers.
These accounts considered all standard commercial architectural photography as an
uncritical, socially disengaged, astute promotion of capitalism. They also furthered the opinion
that commercial architectural photographers cared only about the technical skill of photography
46
Cervin Robinson, “Architectural Photography: Complaints about the Standard Product,” Journal of Architectural
Education 29, no. 2 (1979): 10.
47
Critics such as Christopher Philips and Douglas Crimp have located the origins of such questions in American
museums such as MoMA. By contrast, I return to commercial photography, where these lines of debate took new
shape in the same period. Douglas Crimp, “The Museum’s Old/The Library’s New Subject,” in The Contest of
Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, Richard Bolton, ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 3-14.
22
and were unwilling to situate their work in a larger, social context, which might have
transformed their photography into an art. Such arguments characterize much of the response to
architectural photography produced during the twentieth century. While they may accurately
characterize a significant portion of commercial architectural photography, much is omitted or
over-generalized if the genre is understood only as facilitating the capitalist forces. Nor, of
course, is the sanctified realm of fine art photography so distant from matters of commerce. Even
curator Beaumont Newhall, in his foundational The History of Photography, praised Charles
Sheeler’s contribution to photography’s identity as a “distinct medium”
48
through his
photographs of the Ford Motor Plant in River Rouge (1927), which were commissioned by the
ad agency N.W. Ayer & Son to promote the new Model A car (fig. 0.8).
The history of architectural photography has benefitted from architectural historians—
chief among them Alice Friedman, Beatriz Colomina, Mary N. Woods, Robert Elwall, and Claire
Zimmerman—who have argued not only that modern architecture has been dependent on mass
media for consumption and engagement since the late-nineteenth century but also that mass
media produced the idea of modern architecture.
49
Colomina establishes how and why
photography altered the way in which European modernists viewed their architecture, and how
architecture itself became photographic and filmic, its photographers framing views as one
would see them out of the viewfinder of a camera. The modern house, she writes “collects views
and, in doing so, classifies them. The house is a system for taking pictures. What determines the
nature of the picture is the window.”
50
Media scholars including Giuliana Bruno, Mitchell
48
Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography: from 1839 to the Present (New York: Museum of Modern Art;
Distributed by New York Graphic Society Books, New York, Boston, 1982) [1937], 156.
49
Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge MA: MIT Press,
1994); Robert Elwall, Building with Light: The International History of Architectural Photography (London: Merrell
Publishers, 2004); Mary N. Woods, Beyond the Architect’s Eye: Photographs and the American Built Environment
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Zimmerman, Photographing Architecture.
50
Colomina, Privacy and Publicity, 311.
23
Schwarzer, and Ed Dimendberg have extended the relationship between media and architecture
to explore studies in materiality, urban spatiality, and the temporality of modernity.
51
Such
accounts have proven instrumental in establishing the agency of commercial architectural
photography in shaping the visual culture of modernism generally.
Texts by Simon Niedenthal, Kim Beil, and Susanna P. Newbury have parsed how
commercial architectural photography constructed a distinctly Southern Californian
modernism.
52
They aim to dispel certain myths about the singular reading of modern
architectural photography as glamorous, dramatic, and disconnected from reality. Beil shows the
range of photography done in color, correcting accounts that have focused on the sterility and
rigidity of black-and-white modernism seen through photographs; Niedenthal and Newbury both
read past two iconic Shulman photographs, one of Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann house and one of
Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House no. 22, to show the broader contexts of their creation and
examine how myths of the glamour were created.
53
Jennifer Watts’ book on Los Angeles-based Maynard Parker (2012) pioneered a new
focus on understudied architectural photographers working in Southern California. Watts
convincingly argues that we can understand one trajectory of architectural modernism in Los
Angeles through Parker’s career. Several authors have recently published monographic studies
51
Giuliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2014); Ed Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004);
Mitchell Schwarzer, Zoomscape: Architecture in Motion and Media (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press,
2004).
52
Kim Beil, “The Myth of Black and White Modernism: Color Photographs and the Politics of Retrojective
Looking,” Visual Resources 31, no. 3-4 (2015): 127-53; Susanna Phillips Newbury, The Speculative City: Art, Real
Estate, and the Making of Global Los Angeles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021); Simon
Niedenthal, “Glamourized Houses”: Neutra, Photography, and the Kaufmann House,” Journal of Architectural
Education 47, no. 2 (1993): 101-112.
53
Niedenthal, “’Glamourized Houses.’”
24
on photographers such as Marvin Rand and Wayne Thom.
54
These studies have contributed
valuable biographies and glimpses into prolific archives of previously understudied and
neglected photographers in the region. Indeed, dozens of professional architectural
photographers worked in Los Angeles by the 1950s, as is evident when one flips through
magazines of the time and observes that a single spread might contain photographs by two or
three photographers.
I propose an approach that departs from the monographic model, so as to return to the
dense network of photographers and publications that created and promoted architectural
photography. One of the difficulties of monographs about commercial photography is that they
can isolate the works of individual photographers from the much broader visual and material
culture in which they circulated. The monographic strategy is in fact one of the longest and most
challenged narratives of the author/artist genius figure that has preoccupied art history as a field
for decades, and it has remained dominant when it comes to architectural photography. By
looking closely at photographs as they appeared in many diverse print contexts and archives, my
dissertation reveals a new perspective on the professional lives of commercial architectural
photographers. I show that they contended with the same formal, social, and conceptual
questions over the art of photographing buildings that art photographers and artists using
photography addressed in their work.
Most, but not all, of the photographers considered in this dissertation are men. Most, but
not all, are white. In a time when scholars have rightly expanded the canon of California visual
culture, staging exhibitions and writing rigorous books about women, queer artists, networks of
black creators in LA, and Latinx histories, one might wonder if we need another study of men
54
Emily Bills and Marvin Rand, California Captured: Mid-Century Modern Architecture (New York: Phaidon,
2018); Emily Bills, Wayne Thom: Photographing the Late Modern (New York: The Monacelli Press, 2020).
25
working often to uphold dominant modes of representation.
55
My hope, however, is that this
dissertation answers a recent prompt put forth by the editors of the volume Race and Modern
Architecture (2021), who encouraged architectural historians to “develop, or adapt from other
disciplines, critical hermeneutical methods for uncovering the role of racial thought,” especially
by looking “where it does not, at first glance, appear to be operative.”
56
Expanding from this call,
I excavate the complex entanglements over the political, racial, and social consequences of
urbanism in LA that lie beneath the surface of a range of projects involving architectural
photography.
Los Angeles and Urban Form: The Politics of Representation
In a 2003 documentary that narrates the visual history of cinematic representations of Los
Angeles, filmmaker Thom Andersen quips that it is the “most photographed city in the world,”
while also being the place where “the relation between reality and representation gets
muddled.”
57
Andersen’s documentary is one instantiation of decades of writing visualizing or
analyzing Los Angeles that tries to understand whether the city is exceptional or not. In the
1930s, Los Angeles was considered exemplary because of its rapid population growth in the
preceding decades and its promise to be a globalized, industrial city of the future.
58
By the 1970s,
when my dissertation concludes, the city was considered unique for another reason: it was the
55
See, for example, C. Ondine Chavoya and David Frantz, eds., Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano LA (New
York and London: Prestel, 2018); Kelly Jones, ed., Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980 (New
York and London: Prestel, 2011); Kelly Jones, South of Pico: African-American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s
and 1970s (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017); Chon Noriega, ed., L.A. Xicano (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano
Studies Research Center Press, 2011).
56
Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis II, Mabel O. Wilson, “Introduction,” in Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical
History from the Enlightenment to the Present) eds. Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis III, Mabel O. Wilson (Pittsburgh,
PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), 11. These particular quotations were also highlighted in a JSAH book
review of the volume. Maura Lucking, “Review: Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the
Enlightenment to the Present,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 80, no. 3 (2021): 361-363.
57
Thom Andersen, Los Angeles Plays Itself, directed by Thom Andersen (2003), 2:81.
58
Greg Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1997); Richard Longstreth, The Drive-In, the Supermarket, and the Transformation of Commercial
Space in Los Angeles, 1914–1941. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999).
26
boogeyman that other United States cities feared becoming: run amok by real estate speculation,
too sprawling, and too car dependent. This ambivalence directed at the city is precisely what
made it an ideal subject for photographers and other stakeholders to investigate the paradigms of
urban representation.
Scholars who formed part of what is known as the L.A. School of Urbanism argued in the
1980s that Los Angeles predicted and fulfilled fears of a postmodern urbanism: satellite
communities replacing city centers as decentralized nodes of power, a deepening divide between
upper classes and the impoverished, and a high concentration of post-Fordist economies.
59
Geographer Ed Soja made a similar point to Andersen when he wrote that one can find the trends
of myriad U.S. cities replicated in Los Angeles: “there is a Boston in Los Angeles, a Lower
Manhattan and South Bronx, a Sao Paolo and a Singapore.”
60
As historian Sarah Schrank has
remarked, Los Angeles has been the “well-beaten horse of urbanism and capitalism gone
wrong.”
61
Studying photography as a device for representing Los Angeles in this period reveals
how the city’s problems mirrored those across the nation and world; as such, my dissertation
evaluates shifting narratives of the city’s exceptionalism. As photographers tried to represent the
entire city—recall Ruscha’s desire to capture “every” building on a twelve-mile street—they
encountered the difficulties of reconciling the visual effects of urban development with that
which remained the same, in terms of its appearance. Building from foundational and recent texts
that have situated mobility and automobility at the center of their studies of Los Angeles’s
59
Michael Dear, From Chicago to LA: Making Sense of Urban Theory (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications);
Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York: Doubleday, 1991); Ed Soja, Postmodern
Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London, New York: Verso, 1989).
60
Ed Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 193.
61
Sarah Schrank, “Modern Urban Planning and the Civic Imagination: Historiographic Perspectives on Los
Angeles,” Journal of Planning History 7, no. 3 (2008): 240.
27
growth, my dissertation focuses on how photography often resisted the mobilizing effects of the
city.
62
Much writing since the 1960s has interrogated how the visual qualities and perceptions of
Los Angeles affect its urban character. In his The Image of the City (1960), urban theorist Kevin
Lynch turned a generation of urbanists and architects toward more direct interest in the power of
images.
63
Lynch posited that a city’s legibility, defined as “the ease with which its parts can be
recognized and can be organized into a coherent pattern,” was paramount for a city to function
well and be beautiful.
64
While Lynch was interested in a non-medium-specific sense of cities’
“imageability,” one that developed most strongly in the mental images that people held of cities,
he relied upon photography to study his three principle cities of focus: Boston, Jersey City, and
Los Angeles, with the latter becoming his example of the least legible city.
65
Conditions in L.A.
came to a head with the 1965 Watts uprising, which catalyzed a wave of concern over the city’s
formlessness, violence, and disorder. Considered the first widely televised civic unrest, the Watts
uprising provoked a visual reckoning for journalists, photographers, architects, and artists: much
of the general, white public could not reconcile the images of violence and of poverty circulating
in newspapers and on television with their idealized notion of the city. While the city contended
with the aftereffects of Watts, architectural historians including Reyner Banham purportedly
claimed to study the everyday realities of the city, but this often meant an exclusion of the
62
Eric Avila, The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2014); Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (New York: Harper &
Row, 1971); Genevieve Carpio, Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2019); Vanessa Schwartz, Jet Age Aesthetics: The Glamour of Media in Motion (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2020).
63
Meredith Drake Reitan and Tridib Banerjee, “Kevin Lynch in Los Angeles: Reflections on Planning, Politics, and
Participation,” Journal of the American Planning Association 84, no. 3-4 (October 2018): 217-229.
64
Lynch and collaborator Donald Appleyard first studied Boston through an exhaustive photographic survey, done
on foot, in the 1950s. Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1960), 3.
65
Ibid.
28
ongoing, racialized antagonisms pervading the city in exchange for the development of
theoretical concepts concerning the city’s mobility. Los Angeles, Banham argued, is best
understood from the window of a moving car.
66
Banham brought new attention to the centrality
of automobility and movement to the city’s identity.
By the late 1960s, U.S. writers, bureaucrats, and architects thought that prevailing
conceptions of urban form could no longer serve cities of the present or future.
67
Editors and
architects looked to new visual inspiration for reimagining cities and began commissioning
artists in their research and study of urbanism. What might have once been topics considered the
purview of select city planners or other municipal bureaucrats, gained new traction among the
general public. The resulting projects did more than use art and photography to illustrate urban
ideas; they forged a new model of collaborative thinking about urban problems. Fortune
magazine commissioned artist Romare Bearden to create a collage for the cover of a special
issue on urban crisis in 1968 (fig. 0.9). Art photographer Stephen Shore and artist Ed Ruscha
both had their photographs used by architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven
Izenour in books and exhibitions, which focused on their research into urban form and relayed
their theorization of the budding postmodernism of urban architecture and landscape (fig. 0.10).
What my dissertation demonstrates, however, is that this collaborative work did not arise sui
generis. The collaborations between architectural photographers and urban creative professionals
in Los Angeles in the 1940s and 50s set the terms for subsequent artistic engagement with the
economics, sociology, and architectural theory of other U.S. cities. These new reckonings with
66
Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). For more
on Banham’s theories on automobility, see Ed Dimendberg, “The Kinetic Icon: Reyner Banham on Los Angeles as
Mobile Metropolis,” Urban History 33, no. 1 (May 2006): 106-125.
67
See, for instance, William H. Whyte, The Exploding Metropolis (Garden City: Double Day Press, 1958).
29
urban form demanded visualization, which often came in the form of photography and its history
of representing the city.
Rhetoric about urban form and its visual character had been fomenting in Los Angeles as
early as the 1940s. Promoting city planning as an important pursuit for the improvement of
modern life, in their Los Angeles: Preface to a Master Plan (1941), economist George W.
Robbins and city planner L. Deming Tilton proposed Los Angeles as an important site of study,
especially so as to avoid the “disintegration” and “chaos” already taking over the city as it
expanded and further decentralized.
68
Even earlier, German geographer Anton Wagner attempted
to answer questions about L.A.’s meteoric rise in population and urban development in the first
half of the twentieth century in a book published in 1935. In preparation for the study, he walked
throughout the city, compiling around five hundred photographs of its streets, architecture, and
geography. Mostly devoid of human figures, Wagner’s photographs anticipated work by artists
such as Ruscha, who were determined to represent the city not through its citizens but through
considering its architecture and infrastructure, and how its built environment appeared when
photographed (fig. 0.1 1).
69
Wagner’s photographic study is notable because there was no photography or group of
photographers in Los Angeles similarly focused on the city in the 1930s. The muckraking,
socially concerned photography was centered in New York City, where the legacies of
photographers such as Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine were taken up in the 1930s by the New York
Film and Photo League. Re-formed as the Photo League, this group of leftist and Communist
68
George W. Robbins, L. Deming Tilton, Los Angeles: Preface to a Master Plan (Los Angeles: Pacific Southwest
Academy, 1941).
69
Ed Dimendberg makes this point in his introduction to a new translation of Wagner’s work. Ed Dimendberg, ed.
Los Angeles: The Development, Life, and Structure of the City of Two Million in Southern California (Los Angeles:
Getty Research Institute Publications, 2022).
30
photographers were interested in contributing to politics and activism through photography and
so documented urban life in the city from 1936 to 1951, focusing on poor and non-white
residents.
70
The league had several different active branches, one in Chicago and another in Los
Angeles, but the latter branch did not produce much photography of significance, its most
substantive work being a documentary film focused on a 1934 agricultural labor strike.
71
The
work of the Photo League highlights, however, the dominant way that socially informed urban
photography is said to have developed in the United States.
72
Based on the league’s practices,
histories of photography relay that capturing the city from a progressive perspective in the
second half of the twentieth century had become a matter of street photography and portraiture,
not bird’s-eye views or architectural photography.
73
In California, however, the most active politically motivated photography circulated
through such venues as the Communist-backed, San Francisco-based Western Worker
newspaper, which mobilized photographs to further their causes.
74
In Los Angeles, there were
scattered photographers documenting the street life of the city, but no robust left-leaning
70
The New York Film and Photography League was active until 1935 and disbanded in part over arguments, as
John Raeburn put it, that concerned whether to emphasize documentary films’ “political relevance or esthetic
values” Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution: A Cultural History of Thirties Photography (Champaign, IL: University
of Illinois Press, 2006), 220.
71
Richard Stevens Street, “Lange’s Antecedents: The Emergence of Social Documentary Photography of
California's Farmworkers,” Pacific Historical Review 75, no. 3 (2006): 385-428. It is unclear how robust the Los
Angeles contingent was, as it may have just been comprised of individual photographers who were part of the Photo
League but did not have an organized branch.
72
John Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution: A Cultural History of Thirties Photography (Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 2006); Maren Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in
America, 1890–1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); John Stomberg, “A Genealogy of Orthodox
Documentary,” in Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain, Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and
Erina Duganne, eds., 37-56 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
73
The latter became the purview of such bureaucrats as Robert Moses, who used photography to justify slum
clearance efforts beginning in the 1950s. See Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban
Renewal in Cold War New York (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
74
Ellen MacFarlane, “Photography and the Western Worker: Organizing Farm Labor in Early 1930s California,”
Southern California Quarterly, 100 no. 2 (2018): 183-215.
31
publications that supported photography as a means of political or social expression.
75
It was the
larger Hollywood film industry that became, as historian Michael Denning phrases it, the
“central cultural apparatus” of the avant-garde and working class communities in the 1930s.
76
The absence of such a photographic visual culture, however, is precisely how commercial
architectural photography ended up moving between different social and political agendas in LA.
The professionals in Los Angeles who had the most vested interest in, and the most money to
employ, photography in their projects were not grassroots political activists but, instead, were
bureaucrats, social scientists, architects, and urbanists. Many of these people worked on projects
that attempted to further progressive causes, such as public housing development and
government sponsorship of social programs. They needed photographs that could highlight the
final, positive result of progressive government projects without visualizing their downsides.
Thus, for instance, the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA) relied on
photographs of finished, modern public housing to counter push-back from residents about
displacement caused by neighborhoods razed for such projects. They portrayed a much different
picture of the HACLA’s projects than did photographer Don Normark, who captured the forced
eviction of Chavez Ravine residents when the Housing Authority demolished the neighborhood
for what would eventually become Dodger Stadium (fig. 0.12).
77
Architectural photography was
made to be the public face of what progressive government could accomplish. In so doing, it
75
Such publications would arrive in later decades, such as La Raza (first issue in 1967) and the Los Angeles Free
Press (first issue in 1964).
76
Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York,
London: Verso, 1996), 18.
77
For more on how the plans for public housing in Chavez ravine went awry because of the red baiting and HUAC
trials in the city, see Dana Cuff, The Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000).; Thomas Hines, “Housing, Baseball, and Creeping Socialism: The Battle of
Chavez Ravine, Los Angeles, 1949-1959,” Journal of Urban History 8, no. 2 (1982): 123-143; Don Parson, Making
a Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare, and the Direction of Modern Los Angeles (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
32
became a much more established genre in the city, drawing on conventions of federally
sponsored social documentary photography.
The city planners, architects, magazine editors, and artists who wanted to creatively
imagine a more socially engaged, better functioning Los Angeles of order, democracy, and
beauty never came up with concrete, practical policy plans through which to enact it. What they
did manage to accomplish was a widespread public relations campaign of sorts: the mobilization
of architectural photography to become the diffuse yet recognizable face of these vague interests
in social reform. The consequences of architectural photography supporting such social and
political agendas was that socially concerned photography in Los Angeles did not focus on
portraiture, street scenes, or panoramic skyline views in ways typical of photographs of other
U.S. cities.
78
Instead, its photographers and clients circulated a photography that prioritized
technically proficient, well-composed photographs that imposed a visual order on their subjects
as a way of proposing visual solutions to the city’s problems.
If architectural photographs were socially concerned, however, it was not through the
realism of social documentary photography but instead through their engagement with L.A.’s
futures.
79
Artist and writer Allan Sekula has characterized the difficulties of associating the city
with documentary representation: “Los Angeles is a city that defies the documentary genre: too
protean, overly obsessed with fantastic schemes of what could be rather than confronting the
78
For examples of the latter, see the work of Art Sinsabaugh, who photographed panoramic views of Chicago’s
skyline in the 1960s. The city planning department commissioned him to produce a documentary survey of the city
from 1964-1966, which was used to illustrate their comprehensive plan publication in 1966. Katherine A. Bussard,
ed. The City Lost and Found; Capturing New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, 1960-1980 (Princeton: Princeton
University Art Museum, 2014). There were few street photographers working in Los Angeles in the 1920s and 30s.
Two were Burton O. Burt and Viroque Baker, whose work was published in a WPA book-length study of the city.
Writers’ Program of the Works Projects Administration in Southern California. Los Angeles: A Guide to the City
and its Environs (New York: Hastings House, 1941).
79
The terminology of socially “concerned” photograph dates back to Cornel Capa’s coining of the term. See Nadya
Bair, “The International Origins of ‘Concerned Photography’: Cornell Capa in the United States, Japan, and Israel,”
American Art 36, no. 2 (Summer 2022): 74-101.
33
concrete immediacy of the present or disturbing memories of the past.”
80
The rhetoric of Los
Angeles’s chaos, invented through news media and writings by urbanists such as Lynch, was
continually countered by the ordered frames of architectural photographs, which suggested a
visual method of transforming such chaos as a means of addressing social problems. Historians
such as Denning have argued, moreover, that the social documentary genre was never about a
“triumph of realism,” so much as it was about the 1930s cultural front’s “inability to imagine a
completed narrative.”
81
In other words, the prioritization of realism allowed members of the
cultural front to defer visualizing the future. Paradoxically, architectural photography in Los
Angeles did the opposite: it deferred realism to imagine the future.
The history of commercial architectural photography in fact provides a useful lens
through which to contextualize critiques of documentary photography that arose in the writing of
theorists and artists such as Sekula and Martha Rosler and have proven influential in the way
histories of photography characterize the genre. Rosler writes that documentary photography
“carries (old) information about a group of powerless people to another group addressed as
socially powerful,” and that it has been more wedded to “moralism” than “revolutionary
politics.”
82
Rosler’s answer to the ideological failings of documentary photography was to create
photographic portraits, paired with typewritten lists of words, of New York’s Bowery district
between 1974 and 1975 (fig. 0.1 3). The words and photographs do not refer to each other, and
the photographs provide very little in terms of contextual information about the storefronts
depicted. Representational strategies are meant to collapse on themselves and fail, showing the
80
Allan Sekula, “Los Angeles: Graveyard of Documentary,” in Facing the Music: Documenting Walt Disney
Concert Hall and the Redevelopment of Downtown Los Angeles, ed. Ed Dimendberg (Los Angeles: East of Borneo,
2015), 175.
81
Denning, The Cultural Front, 119.
82
Martha Rosler, “In, Around, and Afterthoughts (on Documentary Photography),” The Contest of Meaning:
Critical Histories of Photography, Richard Bolton, ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990). [1981]
34
insufficiency of technical and aesthetic mastery to capture anything new about impoverished
people and social conditions. In the United States, Rosler writes, categorical distinctions that
would help define what makes a particular photograph, work of art, or piece of writing political
have collapsed. Because of this, she argues, writers, photographers, and historians can claim that
photography which is completely disengaged is, in fact, politically and socially invested.
The fear of the disengaged photograph masquerading as political is a refrain that haunted
leftist writers on the medium in the 1980s. Studying commercial architectural photography gives
further insight into the nuances of why certain photographs are perceived as socially engaged; it
reveals where formal, and technical decisions stood in place of direct representation of social
issues, showing how aesthetics deferred politics convincingly through photography.
83
The Artistic and Social Investments of Architectural Photography
Histories of art and photography have simplified or overlooked the complex social and
political engagements of commercial architectural photography, focusing instead on conceptual
art projects made in the 1960s and 70s that are credited with forging an expository, socially
concerned photography of architecture.
84
Such projects devalued the medium of photography,
using it as a means to an end rather than as a form or craft to be cultivated. When Hans Haacke
exposed illegal activities being perpetuated by slum lords in his Shapolsky et al Manhattan Real
83
Benjamin wages a similar line of critique at Neue Sachlichkeit photographers. Walter Benjamin, “The Author as
Producer, “in Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, eds. The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, New York:
Continuum, 1994), 262.
84
Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004);
Benjamin HD Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of
Institutions,” October 55 (Winter 1990): 105-143.; Diamuid Costello and Margaret Iversen, “Introduction:
Photography After Conceptual Art,” Art History 32, no. 5 (2009): 825-1024; Jason Hill, “Noise Abatement Zone:
John Divola's Photographic Fulcrum,” in Jordan Bear and Kate Palmer Albers, Before and After Photography:
Histories and Contexts (New York: Routledge, 2017); Pamela Lee, “The Austerlitz Effect: Architecture, Time,
Photoconceptualism,” in The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography 1960–1982, ed. Douglas Fogle
(Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2003), 185–194. Several exhibitions have explored conceptual photography’s
political engagements, including Jill Dawsey, The Uses of Photography: Art, Politics, and the Reinvention of a
Medium (Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 2016). Matthew Witkovsky, Light Years: Conceptual Art and
the Photograph, 1964–1977 (Art Institute of Chicago, 2012).
35
Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System as of May 1, 1971, the 146 photographs of the
tenements under investigation were casual snapshots, taken from odd angles with different
exposures and cars and pedestrians distracting from the buildings themselves(fig. 0.1 4). Haacke,
considered a founder of conceptual art, weighed textual and photographic evidence equally.
85
Given the profusion of artist-photographers and fine art photographers who
photographed architecture in the 1960s and 70s under different stylistic and ideological
purviews, it can be difficult to make sense of their relationship to each other, let alone to
commercially architectural photography. Can they be grouped together and considered a
movement focused broadly on representing architecture photographically? Or were their
purposes so divergent that historians can only write atomized narratives of different figures who
happened to be drawn to similar subject matter? By and large, this again becomes a problem of
categorization. The rise of fine art photography of architecture coincided with MoMA curator
John Szarkowski’s promotion of photography’s formalism, which resulted in the implication
that a photographer’s formal innovation was that which determined its artistic contribution to the
medium. Attention to photographic form became associated with art photography and signaled a
certain disregard for using the medium as a tool for social causes.
These topics coincide in the literature on the watershed exhibition New Topographics:
Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape (1975). Originally planned as an historical-to-
contemporary survey of architectural photography, its curator William Jenkins changed course
because he needed to plan the exhibition quickly, thus making it a smaller show focused only on
contemporary photography about the more expansive theme of landscape. Jenkins proclaimed
85
See also the work of Dan Graham, who has said he turned to photography because it did not require any “special
skill,” quoted in Britt Salvesen, Reframing New Topographics, Greg Foster-Rice, John Rohrback, eds. (Chicago:
Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2010), 71-85.
36
that the show expressed a new photographic style of neutrality and lack of judgement. While
often cited as changing the direction of landscape photography, the New Topographics checklist
included a significant amount of architectural photography by many celebrated fine art
photographers, including Lewis Baltz, Frank Gohlke, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Stephen Shore,
and Joe Deal.
Like conceptual artists, the New Topographics photographers shared an interest in
vernacular architecture, cheap tract houses, uniform infrastructure, and other subjects seemingly
distant from the concern of commercial architectural photography. Diverging from their
conceptual counterparts, however, the photographers of New Topographics took great care with
their photographs, creating technically advanced prints that showed great attention to form, light,
framing, and space. In the catalogue, Jenkins quotes Robert Adams, one of the photographers
included, who had said that he wanted to capture the form that “underlines” the chaos of a given
scene.
86
Jenkins argued that this quest for form and skill in crafting photographs is what allows
them to achieve a neutrality towards their subject. Yet as Deborah Bright points out, because the
photographs circulated at a moment of heightened environmentalism and critique of land
degradation at the hands of real estate speculation, the works featured in New Topographics were
primed to be read as a trenchant social critique.
87
Curator Britt Salvesen has offered another view
on New Topographics’s relationship to criticism of architecture by comparing its photography to
contemporaneous photography made for real estate brochures. Photographs made by Henry
Wessel Jr., in particular, closely resembled real estate photographs (fig. 0.15). If real estate
86
William Jenkins, “Introduction,” in Britt Salvesen and Alison Nordström, New Topographics: Photographs of a
Man-Altered Landscape (Tucson, AZ: Center for Creative Photography, 2009).
87
Deborah Bright, “Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men. An Inquiry into the Cultural Meanings of Landscape
Photography,” in Illuminations: Women Writing on Photography from the 1850s to the Present, ed. Liz Heron (New
York: Routledge, 1996) [1985].
37
photographs encourage emotional projection—imagining oneself buying a particular house—
Wessel’s photographs block such interpretation, Salvesen argues, and do so without offering a
direct line of criticism or alternative narrative about real estate, thus leaving viewers unsure of
how New Topographics photographers positioned themselves vis à vis their subject matter.
88
What these perspectives help demonstrate is that New Topographics exposed a lack of
agreement among scholars, photographers, and curators about what makes a photograph critical
in a progressive political sense, both at the time of its exhibition and in secondary scholarship.
Art historians such as Pamela Lee argue that it was these photographers’ turn to vernacular,
common architecture that signaled a critical angle.
89
Yet others such as Salvesen locate the
criticality in the subtle compositional gestures that fundamentally alter viewers’ orientation
around a given photograph, regardless its subject. Studying commercial architectural
photography as a key predecessor to and influence on the 1960s and 70s in photography history
reintroduces form as key to understanding the confusion over critical perspectives. Because of,
rather than in spite of, their association with purely aesthetic decisions, form and technique acted
as the conduit for commercial and fine art photographers in the middle of the twentieth century
to claim a certain social contribution via their photographs.
Even Ed Ruscha, whom Jenkins had heralded as the ultimate inspiration for New
Topographics because of his deadpan, neutral snapshot aesthetic, cared more about the form of
the photograph than his public comments would suggest. Ruscha and his team of collaborators
executed myriad test shoots to perfect the approach to photographing façades along Sunset
88
Britt Salvesen, “‘Real Estate Opportunities’: Commercial Photography as Conceptual Source in New
Topographics, in Reframing New Topographics, Greg Foster-Rice, John Rohrback, eds. (Chicago: Center for
American Places at Columbia College Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2010), 71-85.
89
Pamela Lee, “The Austerlitz Effect: Architecture, Time, Photoconceptualism,” in The Last Picture Show: Artists
Using Photography 1960–1982, ed. Douglas Fogle (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2003), 185–194.
38
Boulevard for his 1966 artist book Every Building on the Sunset Strip, one example of which
began my introduction. Despite his proclamation that photography was dead as a fine art, Ruscha
recognized how formal and technical decisions could radically change the meaning and
significance of a photographic project, and he experimented with different cameras, film, and
angles to achieve the final photographs for the book. In other words, this behavior suggests that
Midcentury commercial architectural photography and its investments in technique and form
gave crucial context to art photography, conceptual photography, and socially concerned
photography in the 1960s and 1970s. I look outside the context of the art museum, where most
photography historians have interrogated the discursive formation of art photography, to the print
contexts where writers and photographers questioned how photography contributed to the
pressing problems of the world.
Many commercial architectural photographers sought the same sense of transcendence
and expression more openly desired by artists. For Shulman, such discovery of underlying
meaning drove his assignments: he once remarked that when photographing industrial buildings
for large corporations, he would give “dramatic views” to the “mundane” subjects that clients
neglected as sites—air conditioning mechanisms, water supply sources, and other operational
facilities—because doing so highlighted the neglected elements of a building’s design.
90
Increasingly involved in environmental projects in the 1960s, Shulman returned to a diversity of
subject matter that was more characteristic of his career in the early 1940s, when he
photographed urban scenes, public housing, and landscapes, folding these subjects into his work
on modernist architecture with new concern for how they holistically expressed his photographic
vision. In a 1965 spread for the Journal of the American Institute of Architects on his
90
Julius Shulman, Architecture and its Photography (Cologne: Taschen, 1998),
39
photography for a project called “Environment U.S.A.,” Shulman wrote that his goal since
beginning his career in 1936 was “a better understanding of human and community needs.”
91
When British architectural photographers experimented with a photojournalistic approach to
architectural photography through the “Manplan” series of issues published by Architectural
Review (1969–70), what differentiated their approach was not only an increase in portraiture, but
also a radical experimentation in form, including heightened contrasts, dizzying angles, and
grainy exposures (fig. 0.16).
The history presented in this dissertation showcases the possibilities and pitfalls lurking
behind the quest to reify social order through photographs. The question of how visual material
resists or encodes dominant power and social structures has preoccupied scholarship on
photography for decades. A new generation of scholars has recuperated the potential of
photography as an emancipatory medium, refusing to see it as a one-sided, disciplinary gaze and
extension of state power. Philosopher Ariella Azoulay has theorized the civil contract of
photography, a contract between individuals and photographs that has throughout photography’s
history bound together all participants involved in a photographic encounter. The theoretical
contract assembles them into a shared citizenship that, she argues, transcends boundaries of
nation and territory and amounts to a collective participation in political power as produced
through photography.
92
My dissertation approaches the question of photography’s power
relations as a site of negotiation over place rather than over citizenship. Photographers
experimented with how the subject of Los Angeles could yield universal, abstract visualizations
of social order and beauty. How little of a city could be represented, I ask, for a photograph to
still prove its social stance?
91
Julius Shulman, “Project: Environment U.S.A.,” AIA Journal 44, no. 5 (October 1965): 45-52.
92
Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2008).
40
Commercial photography has proved challenging because of its multiple investments and
how to navigate its support of, or resistance to, its subjects and commissions.
93
Art historian TJ
Clark, exploring the depiction of class and power by painters such as Gustave Courbet, has
argued that visual indeterminacy, rather than explicit opposition to state power, is the most
threatening to viewers’ sense of social identity.
94
Studying commercial architectural photography
through its ambivalent allegiance to power and critique is essential for understanding how
twentieth-century photography trafficked across many ideologies at once, how one picture could
serve diametrically opposed purposes depending on its context.
95
One can locate the indeterminacy within a larger historical phenomenon that photography
historian Blake Stimson has diagnosed as symptomatic of a transition between modernism and
postmodernism. Stimson has argued that midcentury American photographers were grappling
with the collapse of a modernist understanding of the world. Photographers in this period held on
to the belief that photographs could “reveal and comprehend the hidden material conditions of
the world,” while simultaneously contending with the breakdown of this meaning into the
pluralism of a postmodernist sensibility, or the inability of photographs to express anything but
the conditions of their own construction.
96
More recently, scholars including Heather Diack and
Nicholas Mirzoeff have foregrounded an exploration of photography’s indeterminacy and
93
Robin Kelsey, for instance, has modeled how to read photographers’ agency out of government survey
photography. Kelsey, Archive Style: Photographs & Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1850-1890 (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2007).
94
TJ Clark, The Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1981); Clark, The Absolute Bourgeoisie: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-1851 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1982).
95
Josie Johnson similarly explores the entanglements of political meanings in Margaret Bourke-White’s
photography in America and the Soviet Union. Johnson, “A “Russianesque Camera Artist”: Margaret Bourke-
White’s American-Soviet Photography,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art (Fall
2020): https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.10572.
96
Blake Stimson, The Pivot of the World: Photography and its Nation (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006),
161.
41
uncertainty as key ontological and epistemological principles of the medium. Mirzoeff argues
that documentary photographs taken in late 1950s Notting Hill, London show that photographic
uncertainty is that which exposes how class relations and race relations were being actively
negotiated in the postcolonial era. For Diack, who demonstrates that conceptual artists’ use of
photography in the late 1960s and 1970s was hardly incidental, indeterminacy is the very
modality through which photography has an impact on the world both aesthetically and
politically, and it took conceptual artists contending with these principles to catalyze the rise of
photography as contemporary art.
97
The history of commercial architectural photography reveals an alternate account of this
uncertainty and indeterminacy. Architectural photographers turned to the technical and formal
decisions involved in making a photograph because they believed the formal details of a
photograph could yield a social stance, however implicitly conceived it was. Because
manipulation—from exposures to lens choice to darkroom processing—were so ingrained in the
identity of architectural photography, those who used architectural photographs were primed to
explore the formal and social stakes of these distortions. I thus contend that the preoccupation
over photography’s medium specificity—that its social and creative potential was to be found
through formal and technical experimentation—and the conditions of its construction in the
second half of the twentieth century arose not because of photography’s increased
institutionalization and monetization as a contemporary art, nor because of photographers’
failure to reconcile with the postmodern world, but because commercial photography established
this preoccupation as a method through which to question photography’s social responsibilities.
Chapter Summaries
97
Heather Diack, Documents of Doubt: The Photographic Conditions of Conceptual Art (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2020); Nicholas Mirzoeff, “An Anticolonial way of Seeing,” Interventions, 24 no. 7 (2022): 979-
994.
42
Each of my four chapters considers the history of photography via printed material, to
show what people did with the photographs. I foreground the relationship of photography to the
text and graphic design of its circulated print contexts: a book on city planning, a magazine, and
two exhibition catalogues, respectively. I also analyze the archival records of photographers,
municipal departments, and architectural clients to show the range of expression involved in the
projects under consideration. Commercial architectural photography is hidden and dispersed
across many types of archives, including those of architects, city planners, housing authorities,
and artists. It is rare, however, that individual architectural photographers have papers that
include their correspondences and records for each project.
98
This speaks to the unfortunate
nature of the profession: many photographers did not retain rights to their negatives and prints,
leading to many photographs existing only in material published by their clients. One goal of my
dissertation has been to track down these lesser preserved assignments and consider them
alongside more rigorously archived projects.
Chapter 1 addresses the way books and pamphlets about city planning situated urban
change as a primarily visual, interdisciplinary process and suggests that architectural
photography played a key role in establishing Los Angeles as a model for, rather than an
exception to, city planning interests nationally. I turn to the book Cities Are For People: The Los
Angeles Region Plans for Living (1942) to show how commercial architectural photography was
used to envision a new model of socially engaged, progressive urban photography that could
support arguments for community planning, public housing, and urban redevelopment. The book
blurs the boundaries of what is considered an apt subject for architectural photography subject, a
category that was still inchoate at the time of this publication when photographers experimented
98
Julius Shulman’s archive is a partial exception, with his record books being preserved, but very little by way of
correspondence.
43
with pictorial paradigms inherited from social documentary photography while also trying to
forge their own style. This chapter evidences how the culture of planning in Los Angeles
imprinted the field of commercial architectural photography with certain leftist, progressive
ideals that had an impact on the photographs for several decades, even as such political
orientations fell out of favor in the city and country.
Magazines destined for professional and creative audiences further promoted Los
Angeles as a topic for those interested in urban development. Chapter 2 focuses on the avant-
garde periodical Arts & Architecture Magazine, a frequent topic in design histories, but whose
complex uses of photography to convey arguments about the visual appearance of cities has not
yet been addressed. I evaluate how the magazine supported and shaped the vanguard, modern,
and glamorous style of architectural photography. Even as the magazine was propelling the genre
to a new status of iconicity specifically through the dramatic architecture of LA, architectural
photography was simultaneously mobilized to navigate the complexities and contradictions
involved in situating Los Angeles at the center of modern production. Treating the magazine as a
venue for photographic experimentation rather than just one for viewing architecture and design,
this chapter considers understudied spreads to argue that photography exceeded its role as a form
of illustration and began speaking for itself.
The first study of commercial architectural photographer Harry Drinkwater (1919-2014),
Chapter 3 considers his documentation of artist Noah Purifoy’s 66 Signs of Neon (1966-69), a
group assemblage sculpture exhibition created in response to the 1965 Watts uprising. 66 Signs
of Neon is remembered for exposing how artists contended with Black identity through
assemblage, an understudied perspective in 1960s American art. Yet the importance of
photography to the exhibition has gone unconsidered. This chapter presents Drinkwater’s work
44
in the context of commercial architectural photography in order to argue that Drinkwater
approached his 66 Signs of Neon assignment as an architectural photographer would. In so doing,
Drinkwater’s photographs reveal how commercial architectural photographers assisted urbanists,
architects, politicians, and artists striving to impose urban order in 1960s United States cities in
response to civil unrest, often to the detriment of Black residents. Drinkwater avoids a clear
stance on how to better the Black community in Watts; instead, his photographs intimate the
difficulty of assembling a unified political response to urban uprising through art.
In Chapter 4, I turn to the Los Angeles Documentary Project (1979-81), which indexed
changing approaches to city planning in Los Angeles. A biennial exhibition sponsored by the
National Endowment of the Arts, the LADP crystallized the convergence of commercial
architectural photography, documentary photography, and new forms of socially engaged art
photography. Aiming to counteract what its curators deemed the “popular misconceptions” of the
city, the LADP confronted new paradigms being produced and circulated throughout the 1970s
by the city’s revamped city planning department.
99
The project’s editorial framing ultimately
avoided a clear critical stance on the city’s problems. The LADP offers an alternative explanation
of art photography’s social and political engagement with architecture as a subject in the 1970s. I
argue that commercial architectural photography was not a foil to more critical photographic
projects but instead set the stage on which photographers could expose the problems of
architecture and urbanism.
I conclude this study by tracing the legacies of midcentury commercial architectural
photography into the twenty-first century. I consider the work of photographer Janna Ireland,
who has exhaustively photographed dozens of architectural projects by architect Paul Revere
99
Alan Jutzi, “Year 200: New Views on Los Angeles 1981,” Camera, special issue on Los Angeles Documentary
Project, February 1981.
45
Williams (1894-1980), published in the photography book Regarding Paul Williams (2020).
Ireland considers her project a reparative effort to highlight Williams’s oeuvre, understudied
because he was Black and to reckon with her own difficulties working as a Black woman in
photography. Ireland’s approach to photography reanimates key points of inquiry of the earlier
generation of architectural photography considered in my dissertation. A project that Ireland
situates as distinct from commercial architectural photography, Regarding Paul Williams allows
us to ask whether the late 1970s signaled the end of the genre’s intervention on cities’
appearance, or whether its lessons and experiments have taken new paths to visualize and resolve
problems in Los Angeles today.
46
Chapter 1—Planning Los Angeles through Architectural Photography: Cities Are for
People (1942)
An imposing, two-story white house emerges out of a photograph in a 1939 issue of the
Los Angeles-based magazine The Architectural Digest (fig. 1.1). Bordered by two stone
columns, a gently curved white fence encases the house at bottom. Behind the columns two
complementary dark trees rise from the ground, creating a dramatic vignette that highlights the
façade’s design and its landscaped details. Architectural photographer Maynard Parker
photographed the house, which was designed by architect Paul R. Williams. Across the five-page
spread, the residence of Mr. and Mrs. Lloyd Bacon of the wealthy Los Angeles neighborhood of
Toluca Lake unfolds through Parker’s photographs in all its luxurious glory. The photographs
attend to the profusion of fine furniture in each room without making the mise-en-scène look
cluttered. Parker shot the rooms from oblique angles, allowing the diagonal lines of the
perspective to create dynamic yet organized formal arrangements. Careful lighting adds a variety
of rich, black-and-white tones to each photograph. Parker’s likely use of a wide-angle lens,
moreover, lent a spaciousness to each interior.
Parker’s spread was exemplary of the layouts and editorial vision of The Architectural
Digest, founded in 1920 and described as a “pictorial digest of California’s best architecture.”
100
Its editors foregrounded the quality of the photographs included, boasting that its issues
contained “one of the finest collections of architectural and decorative photographs ever
compiled.”
101
Indeed, the magazine became a gold standard of both architecture and architectural
photography in the region and beyond. Throughout the 1930s, it showcased mansions in
neighborhoods such as Beverly Hills, Brentwood, and Bel Air, occasionally including homes in
100
The Architectural Digest, 8, no. 1 (1930): 3.
101
The Architectural Digest 9, no. 1 (1945), Foreword.
47
other California locations, such as San Francisco and Palm Springs, in addition to luxurious
projects abroad. The magazine was—and still is—large and elegant, at thirteen by ten inches.
Sparse captioning meant that on each page the photographs dominated, and there were never
more than two photographs to a page. It also occasionally showcased the nascent modernist
building in the region, such as when it covered architect Richard Neutra’s Plywood
Demonstration House for the California House and Garden Exhibition in 1936.
102
The Architectural Digest (now Architectural Digest, or AD) still exists, a leading
publication in architectural and design achievements. The magazine’s primary focus in the 1920s
and 30s was picturing architecture. The expanded field of architecture’s social, cultural, or
political role in the growing metropolis of Los Angeles was largely absent. By repeatedly
highlighting the quality of its photographs in the forewords, AD’s editors seemingly positioned
the magazine as a source through which to uncover a history of commercial architectural
photography in Los Angeles. Yet chronicling architectural photography as a commercial field
through magazines like AD relates only a partial history of the genre and its importance in Los
Angeles.
103
This chapter begins in the final years of the 1930s and ends in the late 1940s to
nuance the story of the genre through an unlikely source for architectural photography: the fields
of city planning and urban development. The photographs emerging from these fields may
appear similar to those in AD—they are well composed, lighted, and staged—but their purposes
diverged. Commercial architectural photography, in fact, sat at the nexus between modern
architecture, city planning interests, and emerging paradigms of representing urban space.
102
John Crosse, “Julius Shulman’s First Published Architectural Photograph: Richard Neutra’s 1936 Plywood
Demonstration House,” Southern California Architectural History, December 17, 2009. Accessed July 8, 2022.
https://socalarchhistory.blogspot.com/search?q=architectural+digest
103
Other magazines such as Sunset or Southwest Builder also included architectural photography in the region but
similarly kept it hermetically sealed from discourse about architecture’s larger role in the public sphere.
48
If AD showcased how commercial architectural photography depicted elite mansions and
architectural masterpieces, my chapter looks to books, pamphlets, and exhibitions in which
commercial architectural photography supported the progressive cause of Los Angeles’s future
development. I consider the book Cities Are for People: The Los Angeles Region Plans for
Living (1942) (fig. 1.2) as an entry point into this visual culture to show how architectural
photography helped to popularize and visualize Los Angeles as a work in progress, one whose
citizens were encouraged to take an active role in its future appearance. Cities Are for People
introduced its readers to the idea of community planning and urban development and the value of
becoming active participants in a democratic society.
Community and city planning, urban redevelopment, and urban renewal—terms that can
refer to specific historic proposals as well as general ideologies—were, in Los Angeles,
phenomena that advocates and organizations referenced in overlapping, imprecise ways when
making arguments about how the city needed more organization, less blight, and manageable
sprawl.
104
Those with vested interests in urban design and urban change frequently relied upon
architectural photography to publicize ideas about reforming the city to the general public; as
such, the genre visualized a wide range of at times contradictory proposals aimed at bettering
Los Angeles. Unlike in New York City where, during the mid-twentieth-century, bureaucrat and
urban planner Robert Moses had an outsized influence on the overall form of the city, LA had no
central figure controlling its development and appearance in part because it was too dispersed.
The architects, editors, and city planners in Los Angeles who promoted and commissioned
104
Urban renewal became a more popular term for urban planning and development after 1949 with the passing of
the Housing Act of 1949, which provided federal financing for slum clearance and urban renewal projects to replace
them. It did not become truly mainstream, however, until 1954, according to Samuel Zipp. Thomas Sugrue, The
Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Post-War Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1996); Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2012).
49
architectural photography took similar positions on the politics of urban growth: generally
against racial segregation, they aligned with liberal democratic reform plans but did not contest
the community displacement caused by slum clearance projects that were intended to make room
for more public housing, for instance.
105
The visual culture of planning, moreover, has been strongly biased towards the distant
view of aerial photographs, of site plans, and of maps.
106
Architectural photography became a
tool through which progressive professionals, with varying levels of experience in the social
science of city planning, could give a less-distant view. It straddled the dual needs of planning, to
show both realistic illustrations and speculative ideas about the future even when concrete and
practical agendas for accomplishing these plans did not exist. This temporal bridging, between
present and future, was a far cry from the more straightforward use of architectural photography
in AD to illustrate homes and lifestyles of the rich. Commercial architectural photography
exposes the connections between this interdisciplinary culture of planning, architecture, public
housing advocacy, and urban development that spread in the city beginning in the 1940s.
Cities Are for People and related projects helped to establish commercial architectural
photography in the region beyond the niche of lifestyle magazines. The publication proposed
new subjects for architectural photography, redefining boundaries of the genre that were still
inchoate at the time of its creation. It also placed architectural photography into a relationship
105
Architects such as Richard Neutra took jobs working for the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles
(HACLA). While HACLA’s purpose was to improve what they deemed as blighted communities, this definition of
blight was subjective and communities targeted with this designation were often fully functioning, tight-knit, semi-
rural communities of mostly immigrants, who did not want their lives disrupted by eviction and updated housing. In
the case of Chavez Ravine, see Don Parson, Making a Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare, and the
Direction of Modern Los Angeles (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Thomas Hines,
“Housing, Baseball, and Creeping Socialism: The Battle of Chavez Ravine, 1949-1959,” Journal of Urban History
8, no. 2 (February 1982): 123-143.
106
Meredith Drake Reitan, “Visualizing Cities, Past and Present,” Journal of Planning History 10, no. 2 (2011):
164-170.
50
with new problems of urban space, expanding the issues it could potentially influence.
Architectural photographs were used in the book as a conduit for envisioning a socially engaged,
urban photography while maintaining high standards of composition and technical proficiency:
through these projects, editors and writers experimented with whether photographs of Los
Angeles’s architecture and city streets could serve as convincing visualizations on the basis of
which to develop or cultivate social reform through city planning. The issue that the book
adopted—the need for integrated public housing, active local government, or affordable single-
family homes—mattered less than the need for an image of the city that suggested general social
concern.
Cities Are for People situated Los Angeles as the best possible subject for architectural
photography: photographers could cultivate an appealing and abstract sense of social concern
through well composed, technically advanced photographs of buildings and infrastructure.
Architectural photography acted as a recognizable and appealing form of illustration for a book
attempting to introduce the public to city planning, an unfamiliar idea to many. This chapter
considers how, for a brief period, architectural photography fulfilled two seemingly divergent
purposes: it simultaneously supported the industry of elite architecture, design, and home making
and it supported plans for bettering the city through civic engagement. The genre elucidates not
only how the fields of architecture and design were pulled in these two directions—consumerism
and social concern—but it explains how photography trafficked between the various political
investments of its contexts and the difficulties it encountered in so doing. I look closely at the
appearance of architectural photographs in print to evaluate the effectiveness of how individual
books and photographs visualized large-scale proposals for urban change. Building from
foundational studies of urban reform movements that have demonstrated how photography
51
facilitated the often nefarious ideologies of urban reform movements, I argue that photography
did not evenly or successfully propagate dominant ideologies about urban change in Los
Angeles.
107
Instead, in the case of Cities Are for People, photography offers an alternate way of
understanding the politics and investments behind plans to change the city.
Studying commercial architectural photography’s diverse uses in the 1940s grants a new
perspective on why a robust culture of social documentary photography never developed in Los
Angeles. I show that architects, urbanists, and bureaucrats used commercial architectural
photography in the ways social documentary photography was employed in other U.S. cities. As
such, the image of the progressive city was seen first and foremost through studies of
architecture. I end with a case study that proposes why socially informed photography fell out of
favor in the city, and how commercial architectural photography was partially to blame.
A Close Look at Cities Are For People
Cities Are for People was written by public housing advocate Mel B. Scott and covers the
topic of community planning and its history. Scott wrote an abridged history of the city’s
development starting with Spanish conquest, outlining the various municipal departments that
constituted the city at the time of publication, and introduced readers to topical problems facing
Angelenos. A writer and housing advocate, Scott wrote additional book-length studies focused
on both Los Angeles and San Francisco in the 1940s. He would later serve as a professor at the
University of California, Berkeley, where he wrote the first comprehensive academic book-
length study on urban planning in the Bay Area and a long history of urban planning in the
107
This marks a departure from the methodological approach of such historians as John Tagg and his work on slum
clearance photographs in The Burden of Representation and Dianne Harris’s recent article “Modeling Race and
Class: Architectural Photography and the U.S. Gypsum Research Village, 1952–1955,” in Race and Modern
Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present) eds. Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis III,
Mabel O. Wilson (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), 218-238.
52
United States.
108
Intended for high school students as an accessible document about the past,
present, and future of the city, Cities Are for People aimed to “guide the development of the
community as much as possible, so that instead of being a disorderly patchwork it may be
carefully arranged to facilitate all our activities.”
109
Comprised of eleven chapters across 110
pages, the book contained the following chapters: “Land of Promise,” “Pueblo to Boom Town,”
“Spadework,” “Magnet of the West,” “Metropolitan Mechanism,” “Resource and Jobs,” “Accent
on Living,” “Roadways and Skyways,” “Leisure=Opportunity,” “Energy-Water-Waste,” and
“The Challenge.” Although large in size at nine by thirteen inches, Cities Are for People is not
printed on high-quality paper, leading to photographic reproductions that are not able to be read
for detail. The book does not appear to have had a huge impact; it received only a handful of
reviews and never became a high school textbook. Nevertheless, it showcases an impressive
range of ideas, graphic design, and photography, and presents extensive analysis of the city’s
existing development, freeways, and bureaucracy.
110
It is remembered in part because it was
designed by the young, celebrated graphic designer Alvin Lustig, with drawings by artist Bob
Holdeman. Lustig, influenced by the typography and graphic design of the twentieth-century
European avant-garde to which he was exposed in high school, was prolific during his short life,
designing myriad book jackets, advertisements, magazine covers, exhibition posters, and
pamphlets as well as textiles, furniture, and interior design.
111
Lustig’s design of Cities Are for
108
Mel Scott, The Future of San Francisco Bay (Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies, University of
California, 1963); Scott, American City Planning Since 1890 (Berkeley: University of California, 1978);.Richard
Walker, The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 2009), 133.
109
Mel B. Scott, Cities Are for People: The Los Angeles Region Plans for Living (Los Angeles: Pacific Southwest
Academy, 1942), 34.
110
Jeremiah Axelrod, for instance, has used the book to discuss nascent plans for LA’s freeway building that Scott
discusses. Axelrod, Inventing Autopia: Dreams and Visions of the Modern Metropolis in Jazz Age Los Angeles
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
111
Lustig is perhaps best remembered for his book jackets designed for the New Directions Books, a publishing
house that released anthologies of cutting-edge poetry and prose starting in the late 1930s. Ned Drew, ed. Purity of
53
People prioritizes using Los Angeles as a model, rather than an exception, for city planning
nationally and internationally.
The book opens with a full-page photograph by architectural photographer Julius
Shulman. It is an idyllic landscape with large, overgrown trees in the foreground that frame the
scene as if looking through a viewfinder to two pines in the background, complemented by the
undulating grey tones of the chaparral (fig. 1.3). Cities Are for People’s creators experimented
with different playful styles of illustration and graphic design, intermixed with photomontages.
Lustig and Holdeman rely on many symbols reminiscent of Otto Neurath’s isotype pictorial
language, but they also include biomorphic, organic illustrations that would come to typify a
Californian modern design style.
112
The book includes maps, charts, and an organizational chart
of city government. Several photographs illustrate every chapter, and most of the photographic
layouts are unique, uncopied throughout the rest of the volume. Scott illustrated his book with a
range of photographs from several different sources, including the Automobile Club, the County
Museum, and municipal departments such as the L.A. Harbor Department. Photographs show
myriad subjects, including natural landscapes, grocery stores, power plants, the city dam, aerial
cityscapes (fig. 1.4), and home exteriors. Cities Are for People is one of the early venues, and
possibly the first published book, in which Shulman had his photography published.
113
Aim: The Book Jacket Designs of Alvin Lustig (Rochester, NY: RIT Cary Graphic Arts Press, 2010); Elaine Lustig
Cohen and Steven Heller, Born Modern: The Life and Design of Alvin Lustig (San Francisco: Chronicle Books,
2010).
112
Otto Neurath, a museum director in Vienna, developed the Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture
Education pictorial language between 1925 and 1934. The system spread widely throughout the 1930s. For more on
California graphic design history, see Louise Sandhaus, Earthquakes, Mudslides, Fires, and Riots: California &
Graphic Design, 1936-1986 (New York: Metropolis Books, 2014).
113
Shulman’s first published photograph was in Architectural Forum in July 1936. John Crosse, “Julius Shulman's
First Published Architectural Photograph: Richard Neutra's 1936 Plywood Demonstration House.” Southern
California Architectural History Blog, December 17, 2009. https://socalarchhistory.blogspot.com/2009/12/julius-
shulmans-first-published.html
54
Several of Shulman’s photographs are featured in the book, but it is unlikely that Scott
directly commissioned the architectural photographer. Many, if not all, were photographs reused
from work that Shulman had done for The Haynes Foundation which, along with the Pacific
Southwest Academy—the book’s publisher—provided funding for Cities Are for People.
114
Founded in 1926 by physician John Randolph Haynes and his wife Dora Haynes, The Haynes
Foundation sponsored social science and city planning research in the city and still exists
today.
115
As historian Tom Sitton has noted, in the 1930s the trustees positioned the foundation
as an advisory program that funded academic research and informed public policy, rather than as
an active political agency.
116
In January and February of 1942, the same year that Cities Are for
People was published, the Haynes Foundation commissioned Shulman to produce a
photographic survey of the city.
117
For this survey, Shulman photographed houses, gas stations,
commercial buildings, unpeopled landscapes, old oil rigs, street scenes, and various
infrastructures. Many of these photographs capture instances of model home building, which
would soon slow significantly due to World War II. In one photograph, four houses peek out
from above a sweeping unpopulated hill, its location unknown (fig. 1.5). A banner announcing
model homes is visible beneath one house still under construction. The unusual perspective—
Shulman shot from beneath a hill that threatened to obscure the houses completely—and the
barren, empty composition suggests that Shulman experimented with the composition and
legibility of his subjects under consideration.
114
Shulman (Julius) Photography Archive, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA, 2004.R.10.
115
For a comprehensive history of the Haynes Foundation, see Tom Sitton, The Haynes Foundation and Urban
Reform Philanthropy in Los Angeles: A History of the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation (Los
Angeles: California Historical Society, 1999).
116
Tom Sitton, Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press), 2001,
154.
117
For more on Shulman’s early negatives, see Anne Blecksmith, “A Transitional Place: Julius Shulman's A to Z
Negatives,” Getty Research Journal no. 3 (2011): 201–208.
55
This culture of planning and research on the “haphazard” development of cities was
executed across multiple visual media, physical spaces, and print. Indeed, Shulman was further
involved with Cities Are for People because in 1941 he had photographed the installation of the
exhibit that preceded the book and provided its inspiration: …And Now We Plan. Shulman’s
photographs are the only extant record of the show as it was exhibited and installed, held at the
Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science, and Art from October 22, 1941 to January 18,
1942.
118
Celebrating the benefits of a well-planned Los Angeles and divided into four sections—
“Live,” “Work,” “Play,” and “Move”—,...And Now We Plan visualized every aspect of what its
creators decided good planning would be (fig. 1.6).
119
The County Museum published a
catalogue in conjunction with the exhibition that included an abridged selection of the
photographs from the show. Scott borrowed much of the content and overall visual argument
from the exhibition. A 1941 article in Arts & Architecture mentions the exhibition, praising its
material on city planning and public housing, and arguing that this focus could “demonstrate far
more clearly than any individual building the purpose behind contemporary design.”
120
With so many subjects represented that are not buildings, interior design, or other forms
of architecture, a question remains as to the extent to which Cities Are for People is concerned
with architectural photography. The book, I suggest, constitutes an experiment with how far
architectural photography could have an influence when its subject matter extended beyond
building interiors and exteriors. In a city with few precedents for how photography played both a
social and aesthetic role, the publication stages architectural photography as a genre that can
118
Such thematic exhibitions were common nationally at the time. Many local Housing Authorities sponsored
exhibitions of photography and material on their cities’ public housing advancement. Museums, also, held
exhibitions focused on cities, such as the Baltimore Museum of Art’s “The City: A Visual Review of the Past
History, Present Problems, and Future Planning of Cities,” in the early 1940s. Leslie Cheek papers, 1940-1983, bulk
1940-1942, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
119
Arthur Millier, “…And Now we Plan,” Los Angeles Times Home section (October 19, 1941): 3.
120
Serge Chermayeff, “Architecture and a New World,” Arts & Architecture 58, no. 5 (May 1941): 40.
56
address both present and future urban problems. Cities Are for People also provides insight into
how commercial architectural photography grew as a professional field, as Shulman would
become the region’s most prolific commercial architectural photographer. Shulman in fact
documented the entire culture in which such community planning projects emerged, providing
photographs for the books, photographing the exhibition, and taking portraits of projects’
creators, such as his portrait of Alvin Lustig in his office (fig. 1.7). This would become a
defining characteristic of the field: architectural photographers would become documenters of
the culture of architecture and design in Los Angeles; they would not just photograph buildings.
In an unpublished essay titled “California: The Cultural Frontier” (1946), designer Lustig
complains of California’s poor reputation nationally, as a “vast, sun-drenched landscape dotted
with buildings the shape of puppy dogs.”
121
The advantage of California, writes Lustig, is that
intellectual ideas are shared collaboratively, unlike on the East Coast, and there is a freedom in
the optimism that pervades the culture. Lustig was thus thinking actively of how to combat the
stereotypes of Los Angeles. Indeed, his writing parallels that of acclaimed chronicler of the
region, Carey McWilliams. In advance of his treatise on the region published in 1946,
McWilliams remarked in 1942 that “no other metropolitan area in the United States offers such
possibilities for successful planning as Los Angeles County,” highlighting its “relative newness”
as one of many benefits.
122
Writing of twentieth-century modern architecture and its representation in books across
Europe and the United States, Pepper Stetler and Julia Walker argue that such publications not
only introduced publics to new styles, but also taught people how to look at modern architecture
121
Alvin Lustig, “California: The Cultural Frontier,” 1946. Alvin Lustig Papers, Cary Graphic Arts Collection,
Rochester Institute of Technology.
122
Carey McWilliams, “Labor Plans for Defense Housing,” Arts & Architecture Magazine 59, no. 3 (March 1942):
42.
57
within the context of the city by experimenting with new advances in typography, graphic
design, and printing. “The modern eye,” they write, “craved visual experiences that would appeal
to the speed and dynamism of the metropolis.”
123
Thus, photobooks prioritized movement, new
spatial constructions, dynamic interactions between text and photographs, all of which replaced
“stable objects.”
124
More broadly, Stetler has argued that photographic books produced in
Weimar Germany pioneered photography’s ability to produce “visual forms of perception and
cognition that exceed the capacity of the textual realm.”
125
The clear influence of Weimar-era
experimentation with photography and typography, then, had further implications for Scott &
Lustig’s collaborative practice: photography might carry new ways of expressing meaning apart
from text, explicitly within the context of urban space.
Indeed, many pages of Cities Are for People play with the relation of text, photograph,
and illustration, the latter of which ranged from figurative, biomorphic drawings to isotypic
symbols. On page twelve (fig. 1.8), isotype trains with six cars travels determinedly down the top
of the page and through the text, giving way to dollar-signs falling down the page in an orderly
line. Similarly, on page six, a cluster of oil rig illustrations appears randomly at bottom right,
boldly interrupting Scott’s words. Perhaps most dramatically, on page 28, a low-angle
photograph of an electricity transmission station arises surrounded by a cloud of dark fog and
smoke (fig. 1.9). Out of the photograph extend eight power lines that smoothly transition from
photographic detail to graphic design. The designers’ willingness to interrupt the writing led one
123
Pepper Stetler and Julia Walker. “Introduction: Modern Architecture and the Book,” The Journal of Architecture
20, no. 4 (2015): 577.
124
Ibid.
125
Pepper Stetler, Stop Reading! Look!: Modern Vision and the Weimar Photographic Book (Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press, 2015), 2.
58
book reviewer to remark that Lustig’s designs—the “shadowy T-squares and semaphores”—had
interfered with the text’s legibility and distracted the eye.
126
Such details suggest the movement and dynamism that Stetler and Walker argue is
characteristic of the medium of modern architectural books.
127
Upon closer examination of Cities
Are for People, however, graphic design, rather than photography, achieves most of this sense of
movement and mobility. If the graphic design of Cities Are for People relays the influence of the
European avant-garde on Lustig, including the work of the New Typographers, the photography
is not similarly vanguard. The photographs included do not experiment significantly with the
form of the buildings or landscapes depicted, avoiding extreme angles and exploration of light
and volume so characteristic of much 1920s and 30s photography by figures such as German
photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch or even British architectural photographers Dell &
Wainwright. The cover first establishes the unbalanced relationship between the graphic design
and photography (fig. 1.2). Unusual for Lustig, whose covers did not often feature photography,
is a black-and-white aerial photograph that looks down on the streets of L.A. with corners that
fade into black background. Overlaid on the boulevards are thin red lines that trace the streets
and connect to five simple yet playful white outlines of people, blank except for red hearts the
same color as the arterial lines. Aerial photography gained popularity after World War I, notably
included in Beaumont Newhall’s History of Photography survey exhibition at the Museum of
Modern Art, New York in 1937. Here, the aerial photograph is not situated so as to allow
viewers to admire first its formal details. Instead, it provides the ground on which the graphic
people are animated and the city, seen through photography, becomes the backdrop.
126
Frances Hartwell, “Review of Cities Are for People,” Arts & Architecture Magazine 59, no. 8 (September 1942):
6.
127
Pepper Stetler and Julia Walker, “Introduction: Modern Architecture and the Book,” The Journal of Architecture
20, no. 4 (2015): 577.
59
Likewise, on page four is a jagged cropped photograph of a model showing a three-
dimensional topographic map of the region’s geographic resources before urban growth (fig.
1.10). The page is split vertically down the middle, half white and half black. The map is
animated through the strong lines and city labels that extend out of it. While the photograph is
the main event of the page, it relies on the graphic design and typography for both legibility and
visual interest. Thus, unlike many of the books by such artists as László Moholy-Nagy, who
famously stated that to be ignorant of photography and the camera in the future would make one
illiterate, Cities Are for People shows less interest in photography’s epistemological potential.
128
Indeed, unlike what are considered “photobooks” in art history, Cities Are for People does not
consistently prioritize photography over text, nor does it exclude text in order to cultivate a
photographic literacy above all else. Instead, as I will show, the book conveys how architectural
photography gained meaning through its stability, reliability, and illustrative identity rather than
through its experimentative potential.
Urban Iconographies and Architectural Photography
Considering the differences between Los Angeles’s culture of photography and that of
other major United States cities begins to explain why Cities Are for People refrains from more
polemical uses of photography. A tradition of architectural photography independent of
commercial work done for architectural clients flourished in New York City beginning in the
early-twentieth century, making a new name for urban architecture as a subject of fine art
photography. Photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Alvin Langdon Coburn,
Edward Steichen, and Berenice Abbott obsessively photographed New York’s proliferating
128
Moholy-Nagy, as quoted in Stetler, Stop Reading! Look!, 21. Studying Cities Are for People and the relationship
it establishes between design and photography gives greater insight into how modernist European paradigms of
design and photography were translated and given different form and meaning in California.
60
skyline and modern building, especially its skyscrapers (fig. 1.11).
129
From the 1910s through the
1930s, they created a new type of urban subject, which had the effect, as historian Peter Hales
has argued, of turning urban photography away from social reform and advocacy towards
personal introspection and a focus on the art of the photograph.
130
Stieglitz, for instance, insisted
that his subject matter was buildings rather than people, and architectural historian Mary N.
Woods has noted that these photographers all avoided street photography in favor of shots from
above or below.
131
Even Abbott, whose socially informed work turned her towards tenement
buildings as well as skyscrapers to capture the changing quality of modern New York, portrayed
the city from a measured distance, Woods argues. Woods goes on to suggest that in tandem with
this urban architectural photography arose an alternative method of photographing the city, seen
through the work of photographers such as Alice Austen and, later, Helen Levitt and Morgan and
Marvin Smith. These photographers turned to city life as it unfolded on the street, taking intimate
portraits of New Yorkers amidst busy and chaotic surrounds (fig. 1.12). Woods ultimately argues
that both traditions are necessary to understand the way photography shaped New York’s
modern identity.
132
Commercial architectural photography in New York developed differently than these two
traditions of urban photography, which were seen as the true documenters of city life. The
Museum of Modern Art, in New York’s inaugural architectural show in 1932 featured hundreds
of photographic enlargements, many blown up to three-by-six feet, meant to be reminiscent of
129
Despite these figures’ own entanglements with the commercial world—Stieglitz’s 291 gallery was, after all, a
commercial enterprise—writers, curators and, later, historians advocated their photography as exemplary of fine art
photography.
130
Peter Hales, Silver Cities: Photographing American Urbanization, 1839-1939 (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1983), 289.
131
Mary N. Woods, Beyond the Architect’s Eye: Photographs and the American Built Environment (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
132
Ibid, 81.
61
paintings.
133
While they dominated the public’s reception of the architecture, the museum staff
considered them illustrations similar to elevations, floor plans, and models. These were not
photographs to be considered for their depiction of urban living; instead, they dutifully and
faithfully transcribed the formal qualities of the vanguard modern architecture on display. While
the exhibition had a social element—critic Meyer Schapiro noted that its buildings intimated the
potential for a social revolution—the role photography played in transmitting or affecting these
issues was not enunciated.
134
Ezra Stoller, who would become New York’s most famous and
prolific commercial architectural photographer, began his professional career in the late 1930s
and was thus a belated contemporary of the figures discussed by Woods. Yet his work is rarely
discussed in conversation with these luminaries, regarded rather in a different category of
representing architecture’s first and city second.
135
Photography historians focus their attention primarily on New York and eastern cities;
rarely is Los Angeles considered in comparison, either in the early-twentieth century or later.
While New York developed a more active photography culture earlier than did Los Angeles and
is known for the many standout photographers it hosted, Los Angeles offers a counterpoint that
allows us to consider how the various investments of urban photography—developing an
iconography of a city, exposing social conditions, capturing street life—coalesced in differing
ways. Los Angeles photographers in the 1930s were less encumbered by such an illustrious
history of famous art photographers in their city. Since the 1880s, photography had acted as an
important tool for boosters trying to alert the country to the benefits of Los Angeles. From an
early period, amateur club photography was linked to business pursuits and a vested interest in
133
Thomas Hines, Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art: The Arthur Drexler Years, 1951-1986
(Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute Publications, 2019), 4.
134
Ibid, 5.
135
Nina Rappaport, Erica Stoller, Ezra Stoller, Photographer (New York and London: Yale University Press, 2012).
62
advertising Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Camera Club was founded in 1899 and quickly
gained a large membership and developed close ties to the city’s Chamber of Commerce.
136
In the mid-1920s through the late 1930s, various industries—the city government,
Hollywood, the news media, even the Works Progress Administration’s Southern California
branch—worked to project a new image of Los Angeles that focused on an idealized image of
the city itself (rather than a city imaged through colorful drawings and lithographs of orange
crate labels or Spanish roof tiles). This new city image was represented through photography.
The Chamber of Commerce, in particular, amassed a large collection of photographs as a
promotional device, sending its photographers to capture expensive cars parked in front of
bungalows, residents lounging at the beach, and impressive industrial areas.
137
The dominant
focus of such groups was nonetheless to promote an idealized, picturesque vision of the city.
Cities Are for People emerged out of these photographic conditions but displays a decidedly
more modern, dynamic representation of the city, one that was less concerned with proving the
city’s exceptional character and more intent on demonstrating the similarities between Los
Angeles and the rest of the country.
Urban street photography was rare in Los Angeles at the time, most likely due to the
city’s unfavorable geography for such projects: it was so spread out, even in the first half of the
century, that finding a center teeming with bustling street life was much more difficult than in
New York or other cities such as Chicago.
138
Photographers Viroque Baker and Burton O. Burt
136
Jennifer Watts, “Picture Taking in Paradise: Los Angeles and the Creation of Regional Identity, 1880-1920,”
History of Photography 24, no. 3 (2000): 243-250.
137
Kevin Starr notes that the Chamber of Commerce produced approximately 50,000 photographs by the start of
World War II when the program was discontinued. “Eschewing all signs of urban ugliness or social stress, the
Chamber images communicated a utopian ideality comparable to the orange crate labels of the same period.” Kevin
Starr, Material Dreams: Southern California through the 1920s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 101.
138
While there were photographers based in Los Angeles who were active and associated with the New York-
founded Film and Photo League in the 1930s, it is unclear whether there was an official Los Angeles branch.
63
were hired in the late 1930s by the Works Progress Administration to photograph street scenes in
Pershing Square and on Olvera Street, the site of Los Angeles’s founding turned into a tourism
attraction, to be used in a guidebook published on the city.
139
Their photographs on Olvera Street
show Mexican, Chinese, and Japanese marketplaces and vendors, a rare glimpse into multiethnic
downtown Los Angeles through photography. A notable exception is also the work of German
geographer Anton Wagner, who photographed great portions of Los Angeles in the 1930s while
walking around the city and researching it. He used many of the five hundred photographs he
took as illustrations for his Ph.D. dissertation which would become the book Los Angeles: The
Development, Life, and Structure of the City of Two Million in Southern California (1935).
140
Wagner’s guiding question had resonances with the topics explored in Cities Are for People: he
wanted to know how and why Los Angeles grew so rapidly as a city, as it had become the third-
largest in the country by this time. Ahead of their time, his photographs provide a systematic
street-level view of the city’s architecture, mostly devoid of people (fig. 1.14). The photographs
are not integrated into the text, appearing at the end as an appendix. Yet they give a more
comprehensive view of the city than Cities Are for People because Wagner photographed the
diversity of architectures present in neighborhoods, from Spanish colonial bungalows and
craftsman houses to the various commercial facades on streets, and each captioned with a
description. The photographs are also presented with more objectivity, not coded as either bad or
good, as was the case with Cities Are for People and its careful positioning of photographs to
support arguments about good and bad planning. While it fell into obscurity by the 1940s,
139
Writers’ Program of the Works Projects Administration in Southern California, Los Angeles: A Guide to the City
and its Environs (New York: Hastings House, 1941).
140
The original German title is Los Angeles: Werden, Leben und Gestalt der Zweimillionenstadt in Südkalifornien.
For more on the book and on Wagner, see Ed Dimendberg, ed. Los Angeles: The Development, Life, and Structure
of the City of Two Million in Southern California (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute Publications, 2022).
64
Wagner’s book was widely and warmly received by many in Los Angeles immediately after its
publication, with reviews in such major venues as the Los Angeles Times.
141
Several commercial photography studios flourished in Los Angeles, producing hundreds
of prints and negatives that serve as important records of the city’s architecture and views. The
Dick Whittington studio was the largest studio in L.A., employing twenty-seven photographers
by the 1930s. The studio took on a wide range of commercial assignments, including many
architectural shoots. Likewise, a photographer named Fred R. Dapprich established a successful
firm, and he photographed many architectural scenes in the 1920s and 30s, including early
modernist homes in the region by architects such as Gregory Ain, although he also specialized in
portraits and landscape. Finally, the Luckhaus Studio, founded in 1924 by Arthur Luckhaus,
similarly boasted many architectural clients. The Whittington, the Dapprich, and the Luckhaus
Studios all took assignments related to progressive causes such as public housing, all becoming
clients of the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles for certain assignments. Such studios
and photographers produced technically and aesthetically competent photographs of architecture.
They also took on a range of assignments similar to architectural photographers who began their
practices in the 1940s. Why, then, did a subsequent generation of commercial photographers
choose to further specialize their practices, advertising themselves as architectural
photographers, even as they continued to take on assignments that were not exclusively
photographs of building exteriors and interiors?
The answer, I argue, lies in the planning culture that gained popularity in the late 1930s.
By the time that architectural photographers such as Shulman, Marvin Rand, Roger Sturtevant,
and Robert Cleveland began their professional photography careers in the late 1930s and 1940s,
141
Ibid.
65
the city still lacked a form of photography that integrated city, social concerns, architecture, and
fine art photography aesthetics.
142
These conditions set the stage for projects that rethought how
photography could represent the city, and to what end. Cities Are for People suggests an
approach to architectural photography that resembles several types of commercial photographic
genres and subject matter: social documentary, street photography, aerial photography, and
landscape photography. As such, it helped establish Los Angeles commercial architectural
photography as that which could express the social and the aesthetic, the formal as well as the
political, through a subject matter not limited to a particular type of architecture or infrastructure.
A Culture of Planning
Cities Are for People, and the preceding county museum exhibition …And Now We Plan,
were two of several projects produced in conjunction with the Los Angeles chapter of an
organization called Telesis. Housing reformers founded Telesis in San Francisco in the 1930s
with professionals across fields whose interests included engaged, citizen-centered planning and
public housing advocacy with attention to the needs of local communities. Scott was first part of
the San Francisco group, alongside such professionals as architectural historian Francis Violich,
landscape architect Garrett Eckbo, and architect Vernon DeMars.
143
A Los Angeles branch
formed in 1940, inspired in part by Telesis’s first large project, an exhibition at San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art titled A Space for Living.
144
The Los Angeles chapter likewise boasted
142
In the early 1930s, Berenice Abbott’s publication of Eugène Atget’s negatives of 19
th
-century Paris catalyzed a
new interest in the way street photographs captured the life and character of cities. Abbot’s own project, “Changing
New York,” begun in 1935, was a wide-ranging amassment of street photographs of the city that placed new
attention on photography’s ability to show how cities changed. Sarah Miller, Documentary in Dispute: The Original
Manuscript of Changing New York by Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland (Toronto: RIC Books, 2020);
Terri Weissman, The Realisms of Berenice Abbott: Documentary Photography and Political Action (Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 2011).
143
Richard Walker, The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 2009), 132.
144
Nicole Oest, Photography and Modern Public Housing in Los Angeles (Heidelberg, Ger.:
https://www.arthistoricum.net/, 2021), 96.
66
illustrious members of the city’s architecture, design, and urbanism circles, including Richard
Neutra, Arts & Architecture editor John Entenza, and museum director Roland McKinney.
145
In
Los Angeles, Telesis’s intentions were not necessarily to enact the work of city planning at a
municipal level but instead to ideologically encourage the mobilization and advocacy of Los
Angeles citizens.
146
Despite the attention to the urban problems of the city, their focus was on the
entire county, thus providing a hybrid study of both city planning and regional planning; Cities
Are for People, for instance, concludes with an organizational chart elucidating the different
offices involved in the county government. The writings of urban historian Lewis Mumford and
designer Norman Bel Geddes were of particular influence to Telesis. Mumford’s The Culture of
Cities (1938), for instance, provides a method and model for investigating the deleterious effects
of growth and technological advances on cities. He decries the aimless development of so-called
megalopolises, which had become too overwhelming for the human scale.
147
More locally, the
publication Los Angeles: Preface to a Master Plan (1941), an academic edited volume, provides
inspiration with essays, many written by Telesis members, addressing how to “implement
existing programs of planning and to support public officials in their efforts.”
148
Toggling
between practical plans and speculative theorizing, Preface to a Master Plan attempted to
influence the city in their production of a comprehensive master plan for the city, a goal which
would not be officially enacted for another thirty years.
Such a vested interest in a holistic, all-encompassing, and democratic approach to
planning was not unique to Telesis, regional planning groups, or to California interests. Historian
145
“…And Now We Plan” Exhibition Pamphlet, The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA, NA9127.L7 L7.
146
Axelrod, Inventing Autopia.
147
Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1938).
148
George W. Robbins, L. Demming Tilton, Los Angeles: Preface to a Master Plan (Los Angeles: Pacific
Southwest Academy, 1941), xv.
67
Andrew Shanken has traced how the United States experienced an economic, political, and
cultural shift between the Depression and the 1940s, catalyzed especially by World War II,
towards a collectivizing culture of planning.
149
This general sense of planning spread in
popularity because it “offered common ground in a moment of clashing modes of pedagogy,
practice, and taste.”
150
Influenced by European modernist precedents developed in the interwar
period through such organizations as the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne,
(CIAM) this planning culture was adopted and embraced not only by the federal government but
also by the popular press (Life, Fortune) and professional fields (advertising, politics, finance).
Its proponents focused on framing the idea of planning as a broad, future-facing activity that
would lead to a better world after the war.
So pervasive was this planning culture that it spread to the scale of the individual:
through a prolific body of literature, exhibitions, and pamphlets, citizens were encouraged to
share the responsibility for planning in their own lives and within their own communities. The
economic support for planning projects implicated United States architects who, lacking
centralized organization as a profession, had found themselves without lasting professional
purpose throughout the 1930s. Architects thrust themselves into conversations about planning.
City planning offered a particularly fruitful site for testing such abstract ideas about the future.
151
With regard to Telesis, Shanken has noted that their devotion to planning was not fleeting or
trend based; rather, it emerged out of “long-standing modernist ideals and the experience of the
Depression and New Deal.”
152
149
Andrew Shanken, 194X: Architecture, Planning, and Consumer Culture on the American Home Front
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
150
Ibid, 8.
151
The futurity of architectural illustrations is addressed in detail by Marie-Madeleine Ozdoba, “Tomorrow’s Life
Today'. Le mythe de l’architecture ultra-moderne dans la presse américaine (1947-1964)” Temps des Médias, 24
(2020): 272-274.
152
Shanken, 194X, 10.
68
In addition to becoming a professional pursuit, planning, as Shanken notes, also
“exhibited figurative qualities, standing in for other ideas, such as the future, better living,
comfort, order, and most emphatically, the potential for a radical change in the social
structure.”
153
For Shanken, photography was not the primary visual medium through which
planning culture was instantiated. Instead, he contrasts the “organic purism” of abstract graphic
design that enlivened planning literature to the photographic “mug shots” of downtrodden slums
that characterized New Deal visual culture.
154
Such a transition from harsh photographic realities
to modern abstractions does not, however, sufficiently characterize the status of photographs in
planning-oriented material in the 1940s. Photography’s influence, I suggest, concerned the dual
meaning of planning: both practical and figurative, it required an image form grounded in reality
that nonetheless had the potential to gesture towards abstract, unrealized futures.
Shanken further asserts that architects began working beyond traditional forms of
architectural representation—plans, sections, and elevations—in order to achieve an “abstract,
popular, resolutely modern, and purportedly universal language in which to engage the public in
thinking about planning.”
155
Shanken calls such visual material “unarchitectural,” because it did
not attempt to describe spatial or architectural qualities of buildings. Conceived as it was through
this ubiquitous planning culture, Cities Are for People might fall under the purview of Shanken’s
unarchitectural category. Even if some of the photographs diverge from conventional paradigms
of visual representation in architectural magazines, rather than characterize them as
unarchitectural, I consider how the photographic presentation in Cities Are for People blurs the
boundaries of what is considered a subject for architectural photography.
“Accent on Living”
153
Ibid, 16.
154
Ibid, 24.
155
Ibid, 26.
69
Providing a wide visual survey of the city, Cities Are for People uses photographs of
buildings, both exteriors and interiors, to support diffuse theories about planning’s benefits. The
first spread to exemplify this is a four-photograph design depicting, as the center title in the
middle of the images proclaims, the idea of “motorized living” (fig. 1.15). What is shown are not
photographs of cars whizzing by on a street nor people inside of cars but, instead, four
representations of the harmonious relationship between cars and the buildings made to
accommodate them. While planning’s print culture afforded photographers the opportunity to
photograph a variety of city sites, Cities Are for People nonetheless places representations of the
home—and the house—on a pedestal.
Chapter 7, “Accent on Living,” is where Scott lays out the importance of houses and
neighborhoods to the overall quality of a city. The chapter opens with a full-page architectural
photograph by Julius Shulman of a covered, outdoor patio (fig. 1.16), the house designed by
Richard Neutra.
156
Taken from a low angle, the photograph produces a sweeping, spacious view
that balances a sun-drenched backyard with the cool, clean lines of the modern house. Delicate
plants intrude delightfully in the foreground, further exemplifying the benefits of an indoor-
outdoor hybrid lifestyle. The curve of a chair at right resonates with the curvature of the
cylindrical supporting beam, both of which provide a complementary contrast to the dark wood
beams that plunge in a strong perspective towards the square, glass window in the back. The
house is marked by the elegance of the new, modern architecture appearing throughout Los
Angeles in the period, not the stark functionalism of modern public housing architecture in the
city.
156
This is the Maxwell House, built in 1941, located in Brentwood.
70
Photographs similar to figure 1.16 appeared throughout the pages of west coast
architectural magazines at the time. Such compositions highlighted several popular components
of California’s modern architecture: the natural flow between inside and outside, the
spaciousness even in small rooms, and the dynamism created by their extended, sweeping roof
lines and windows. Magazines such as Arts & Architecture, moreover, used similar photographs
to illustrate articles about issues larger than a single house, as did Scott. The December 1943
issue of Arts & Architecture featured an article titled “Urban Redevelopment—it’s wonderful!”
by architect and urban planner Simon Eisner.
157
To the right is a full-page photograph by Roger
Sturtevant showing a partially covered modern patio (fig. 1.17). While the house in this
photograph and that used in Cities Are for People are quite different, the photographs emphasize
the same abstract qualities evoked by the modern architecture. Both also ground the supporting
texts, which are concerned with larger issues regarding planning, neighborhood design, and land
use laws, in the pictorial conventions of the modern home.
Scott’s chapter makes this link between house and neighborhood more explicit. The
average man, he writes, must realize that “his home is not something apart from the
neighborhood. The whole neighborhood, not just the house in which he lives, is his home. If the
neighborhood no longer seems a desirable place in which to live, his house, too, will seem
undesirable to him.”
158
A desired home, Scott suggests, has the capacity to radiate its influence
centrifugally to its neighborhood, community, and city. Andrew Shanken characterizes this as a
central tenet to the logic of planning culture, showing how in their book You and Your
Neighborhood (1944), Oscar Stonorov and Louis Kahn repeatedly compared cities to different
157
Simon Eisner, “Urban Redevelopment—it’s wonderful!” Arts & Architecture 60, no. 12 Magazine (December
1943): 18.
158
Mel Scott, Cities Are for People: The Los Angeles Region Plans for Living (Los Angeles: Pacific Southwest
Academy, 1942), 53.
71
parts of a house: bedrooms to the quiet sections of a city, etcetera.
159
Why, then, should Scott’s
chapter be considered anything but another iteration of the national visual language cultivated
through planning culture? Unlike Shanken’s numerous examples that feature abstract graphic
design and drawings, Scott instrumentalizes photography in Chapter 7 to position it as the
medium through which a new Los Angeles could be imagined, a site where the problems of the
entire country might be reconciled. That which supports conceptual and creative solutions to Los
Angeles’s problems, Scott’s chapter demonstrates, are architectural photographs, which act as a
metonym for more comprehensive views of the city. Throughout Chapter 7, Cities Are for
People uses architectural photography to preview the future of the cityscape, in effect positioning
it as an urban photography.
After the orderly, opening photograph of the modern house, Chapter 7 next includes a
photograph altered with graphic design. It illustrates a page whose section title is “What Makes a
Good Neighborhood?” The photograph shows a series of rooftops in full sun (fig. 1.18). Trees to
the right of the frame add to the disorganized, cluttered effect, and it is difficult to differentiate
between all the objects in the frame, to tell where a house ends and another begins. The jagged,
uneven cropping of the photograph contributes further to the photograph’s disorganization. Such
experimentations with the crop appeared frequently around this time in Arts & Architecture and,
as such, the photographic spreads of Chapter 7 resemble those of magazine layouts, creating a
style and approach to the photographs that connected different print media. A member of Telesis,
the magazine’s editor John Entenza doggedly promoted both Telesis-sponsored projects and
broader proposals for urban redevelopment and public housing, and did so through dynamic,
experimental layouts combining text, graphic design, and photography. In the May 1943 issue,
159
Stonorov, Oscar and Louis I. Kahn. You and your Neighborhood: A Primer for Neighborhood Planning (Revere
Copper and Brass Incorporated, 1944); Shanken, 194X.
72
architect Richard Neutra authored “Planning Postwar Fabrication,” which featured five
creatively cropped photographs showing the progression of building a house to its transformation
as a finished product (fig. 1.19). The physical process of putting together the photographs in the
layout, exemplified in the bold cropping, seems to draw a comparison between the work of a
magazine layout designer, book designer, and the work of an architect, both building their
product in different media.
A thick, painterly ‘X’ placed squarely in the middle of the frame of the photograph
blocks out any chance of discerning a comprehensive sense of the scene, and a blocky arrow
invites readers to turn to the next page.
160
We might imagine the ‘X’ having been drawn on by a
city planner or urban designer, exerting their influence over the photograph that, on this page, is
the raw material in need of transformation. Readers, moreover, survey this intervention of the
‘X’ over the photograph. By empowering them to become advocates for city planning, this page
encourages readers to discern for themselves why this view is faulty and undesirable.
Exemplified in this chapter, Cities Are for People represents architecture as, per one reviewer’s
comment, the “malleable” building blocks of the neighborhood.
161
It does so by placing
photographs as the raw, supporting material that can be manipulated, altered, and changed. What
is not altered, however, is the opening photograph seen in figure 1.16. That which reads most
directly as an architectural photograph remains formally intact, its pictorial integrity preserved.
Throughout Chapter 7, Lustig changed the way the included photographs convey
information. Three two-page spreads that follow the ‘X’ photo in figure 1.18 are organized by
160
Arts & Architecture editors used a nearly identical “X” in a spread showing proposals for development of Bunker
Hill. The “X” is placed over a photograph of tenement-like apartment structures. Arts & Architecture Magazine 60,
no. 7 (July 1943): n.p.
161
Frances Hartwell, “Review of Cities Are for People,” Arts & Architecture Magazine 59, no. 9 (September 1942):
6
73
the thematic qualities of good and bad neighborhoods across two-page spreads, where the
‘good,’ in white, appears on the verso and the bad, in black, on the recto (figs. 1.20-22). The
comparison categories are as follows: privacy versus lack of privacy; convenience versus
inconvenience; spaciousness versus crowding; fresh air and sunlight versus gloom and polluted
air; good design versus poor design; neighborhood appearance versus unsightliness; safety
versus danger; quiet versus noise; and architectural unity versus architectural hash. What
follows, in the profusion of images, are provisional proposals of what the city could look like,
each photograph a new experiment with what perspective might best convey good and bad
qualities. There is no uniformity in composition, subject, or iconography other than the inclusion
in most shots of some sort of architecture, and no particular features signify the area as distinct
regionally (with the exception perhaps of a few shots including palm trees). In the comparison
between architectural unity and architectural hash, for instance, architectural clarity is not
prioritized – the images must be scrutinized to pick apart what is considered poor about the hash
photo – too much individualism– and good in the unity photo – uniformity – from otherwise
innocuous streets (fig. 1.23).
Most of the more abstract comparative themes are illustrated by photographs comparing
architectural subjects or urban landscape scenes. In the comparison between quiet and noise, for
instance, “quiet” is represented by a photograph taken from the porch of a house, whose dark
columns frame a quaint scene beyond. The photograph was included uncropped in the exhibition
pamphlet for …And Now We Plan (fig. 1.24), demonstrating how, between the exhibition, the
Telesis group, and the book, there was a common source of documents and photographs from
which to draw on when illustrating aspirational conditions in the city. The comparison between
good and bad design highlights Scott’s opinions about architecture and also suggests a
74
photographic preference. “A simple, unpretentious house is preferable to one that strives to be
impressive or ‘different’” Scott writes of architectural design.
162
The “good” photograph shows
an expansive lawn with a single white house in the middle ground. The photograph shows a
much grander house but one that Scott clearly considered in poor taste, and he writes of the
“delusion” under which people assume that a costly house is a well-designed house (fig. 1.25).
163
The photograph has been taken from some distance, and what looks to be a blocky, multi-story
revival-style house arises out of the dark hills into which it is nestled. The photographer’s
distance emphasizes not only the house’s expanse but its isolation: it looks like an anomaly
amidst nature. The darkness of the hill’s exposure in the photograph further complements its
placement on the “dark” side of the comparison. By juxtaposing two photographs from
completely different perspectives, Lustig uses photographic convention to achieve a stronger
contrast. It is difficult from the small photographs to truly assess the architectural character of
either house, but the comparison achieves sufficient markers of difference to convey the
message. Architectural photographs, then, could serve a purpose for lay audiences. They did not
need to depict particularities of architectural design so much as they needed to project a general
sense of the character imbued by architecture in a city.
The architectural photographs in the comparison section also confirmed an argument
about the changing popularity of architectural style in Los Angeles. In the ‘architectural hash’ /
‘architectural unity’ juxtaposition, Scott writes: “A Spanish house or a colonial house may be
beautiful in itself, but a Spanish house next to a colonial house next to an English house next to
an ultra modern house – well that is individualism run wild. Many a street in our region is simply
162
Mel Scott, Cities Are for People: The Los Angeles Region Plans for Living (Los Angeles: Pacific Southwest
Academy, 1942), 57.
163
Ibid, 58.
75
a museum of architecture. The houses bear no more relation to one another than did the pavilions
of the foreign governments at the world’s fairs in New York and San Francisco before the
war.”
164
The photograph of architectural hash, shot by Shulman but uncredited in the book, by no
means depicts a blighted area (fig. 1.26). The street, in fact, boasts young palm trees and
handsome revival-style houses. Yet the comparison announces what would become a dominant
subject for architectural photography: the row of similar duplex-style modern homes shown
under the banner of stylistic unity. The comparison succinctly illustrates the AD penchant for
luxurious revival homes falling out of favor for the city’s progressive leaders in design and
architecture. Yet Chapter 7 in its entirety illustrates that despite shifting changes in architectural
style, the formal conventions through which such architecture would be depicted—low angle
shots of entries, oblique angles to emphasize a building’s length, shots that avoided too much
ground or sky—would remain consistent. This further reinforces the presentation of architectural
photography as a recognizable genre, reliable for providing an urban iconography no matter the
print context.
Public Housing and Socially Engaged Photography
Photography has been instrumental in defining slums by depicting them over the course
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
165
The “poor” photographs in “Accent on Living” draw
upon conventions of expository photojournalism and social documentary photography, ranging
from the work of Jacob Riis in the late 1800s New York, federally sponsored photographers in
the Farm Security Agency in the 1930s, and also resembled subsequent photographs published
164
Mel Scott, Cities Are for People: The Los Angeles Region Plans for Living (Los Angeles: Pacific Southwest
Academy, 1942), 60.
165
Maren Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890-1950 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1989); John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and
Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
76
by Robert Moses’s Committee on Slum Clearance in New York City to justify urban renewal in
the 1950s. In the case of the Farm Security Administration, for instance, Themis Chronopolous
has argued that photographs could prove that their programs were “successful in transforming
disorder into order.”
166
Prior to his work for Cities Are for People, Shulman had in fact taken on
such assignments. Very little record exists of these photographs, but there is one extant photo in
his archive: an unassuming, two-story house appears in direct sunlight (fig. 1.27). A cluster of
bare branched trees in the foreground, coupled with a random assortment of objects in the yard
and on the front porch, makes the photograph appear cluttered or perhaps hastily framed.
Unusual for Shulman’s archive, on the back of the picture is a note:
“Titled ‘How Americans Live’ by a social investigation group, this photograph was used in a
campaign for slum clearance. In this field the miniature camera is invaluable because it is
inconspicuous. I have prepared a series of such photographs which are to be used extensively in
drives to better living conditions of many thousands of victims of depressions and inequalities. –
June 1939”
167
Shulman is most likely referring to his commission from the Haynes Foundation, but this is the
only direct mention he has ever made of this photography survey.
168
Shulman has often distanced
himself from this early period in his career, selectively mentioning assignments from the late
1930s in his various published books, and never directly addressing his work for housing reform
clients. Before transitioning to a 4 x 5 or 8 x 10, which provided more detailed, controlled, and
technically advanced photographs, Shulman shot with a Vest Pocket Kodak, eponymously
named because it fit in one’s vest pocket. That Shulman praised it in this context for being
“inconspicuous” is one of the starkest contrasts to conventional architectural photography work,
166
Themis Chronopolous, “Robert Moses and the Visual Dimension of Physical Disorder: Efforts to Demonstrate
Urban Blight in the Age of Slum Clearance,” Journal of Planning History 13, no. 3 (2014): 210. See also Tim
Cresswell, The Tramp in America (London: Reaktion Books, 2001).
167
Shulman (Julius) Photography Archive, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA, 2004.R.10.
168
As Anne Blecksmith has noted, this period is particularly difficult to trace because Shulman had not yet adopted
his meticulous record-keeping system through which the rest of his archive after the early 1940s is catalogued.
Blecksmith, “A Transitional Place: Julius Shulman's A to Z Negatives” Getty Research Journal 3 (2011): 201–208.
77
marked by an extreme conspicuousness due to large-format cameras being placed on tripods, and
due to the often-extreme positions and angles into which photographers would place themselves
to achieve a shot. The photograph, as well, breaks many of the pictorial conventions associated
with twentieth-century architectural photography: rather than framing the house, out-of-focus
tree branches in the front obstruct the façade, and the shadow in the foreground does not help
create a perspectival line to guide the eye spatially. For all these reasons, it is further significant
that commercial architectural photography developed out of these socially informed
commissions.
Cities Are for People thus did not pioneer its model of socially informed, urban
architectural photography in a vacuum. Rather than anomalies when compared to Shulman’s
contemporaneous work for such modernist architectural giants as Richard Neutra, such projects
must be considered along the same spectrum of production. Neutra, after all, retained a leftist and
socialist outlook on issues of housing when he emigrated to the United States, and was one of the
most dogged advocates for public housing and slum clearance in the city, despite his reputation
for building modernist masterpieces in the form of single-family homes.
169
Cities are for People,
moreover, was conceived of during a particularly active period of time for public housing in the
United States. The Wagner-Steagall Housing Act of 1937 established the United States Housing
Authority, which would function as a loan-granting institution, allowing individual cities to
apply for federal funds for the creation of their own housing authorities to build and manage
public housing. The Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA) was founded the
following year. The pervasive culture of planning that swept across the United States in the
1940s affected public housing initiatives in particular. Many planning advocates focused their
169
Dana Cuff, The Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge: The MIT
Press, 2000).
78
attention on public housing because it was an outlet for anticipating serious housing shortages
during and after the war. HACLA in particular was invested in racially integrating all of its
housing projects, and projecting what historian Don Parson has referred to as “community
modernism,” in which public housing could be a template for new class, racial, and social
orders.
170
Public relations material became an early component of housing authorities, which
were required to submit an annual report of their accomplishments. By 1940, HACLA invested
significant effort in its reports, hiring graphic designers to design them and including substantial
photographic illustrations. It hired many commercial architectural photographers and was one of
Shulman’s biggest clients in 1941.
171
Until recently, the photographs and public relations print material of 1940s HACLA
existed in relative obscurity, scattered across several private and municipal archives and
mentioned only briefly in scholarship.
172
In a recent book-length study on the photography of
public housing in Los Angeles, however, photography historian Nicole Oest animates the rich
collection, considering their social, political, and cultural effects as rhetorical tools of the larger
housing movement.
173
Contextualizing the photographs through the reports, survey, journals, and
exhibitions in which they circulated, Oest argues that public housing photography in Los
Angeles was a critical “knowledge-carrier” of transnational, modernist discourses about housing,
placing them at the center of the establishment of a United States culture of housing. This
culture, she thus proves, was established through visual and specifically photographic means.
174
170
Don Parson, Making a Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare, and the Direction of Modern Los Angeles
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
171
Nicole Oest notes this about Shulman in her book Photography and Modern Public Housing in Los Angeles
(Heidelberg, Ger.: arthistoricum.net, 2021).
172
Ibid.
173
Nicole Oest, Photography and Modern Public Housing in Los Angeles (Heidelberg, Ger.: arthistoricum.net,
2021).
174
Ibid, 15.
79
The study demonstrates that photography of public housing has been a crucial missing piece of
histories of photography focused on 1930s social documentary and New Deal-era photography,
and Oest’s meticulous archival research brings to light previously understudied connections
between photography studios, public housing officials, modern architects, magazines, and
journals.
One of Oest’s primary aims is to suggest that studying the photography of HACLA can
unearth exchange between local agencies and a national and, as she terms it, transnational culture
of housing advocacy.
175
What her study does not account for is the uniformity in style, formal
conventions, and visual approach to the photographs and printed material between HACLA
material, planning visual culture material, and other housing authorities’ material culture
nationally. Despite her deep knowledge of the local conditions of housing photography, Oest’s
study fails to make a strong case for reasons to study the photography of Los Angeles in
particular.
This is because of a methodological choice. Oest builds on photography histories by Alan
Trachtenberg, Sally Stein, and Maren Stange who laid the foundation for studies that consider
photography as a site of negotiation of social and political rhetoric.
176
Such scholarship paved the
way for the field of the social history of photography, as it insisted that photographs cannot be
relegated to the status of illustration and that they achieve their purposes differently than
paintings, sculptures, or other media that have traditionally been the focus of art historical
scholarship. Yet in borrowing from socially informed art historical accounts, Oest discounts a
175
She points to at times tangential connections between Los Angeles and the European houser communities with
whom notable advocates such as Catherine Bauer Wurster engaged.
176
Maren Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890–1950 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1989); Sally Stein, “The Rhetoric of the Colorful and the Colorless,” Ph.D. Diss., Yale
University, 1991; Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Matthew Brady to
Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989).
80
method that analyzes “visual conventions” of photographs.
177
In other words, Oest considers a
socially informed approach as distinct from one that takes seriously what an analysis of form can
teach us about the social.
Furthermore, Oest remarks that her study deemphasizes the role of photographic genres
and categories, explicitly stating that she does not bring housing photographs into conversation
with architectural photography.
178
Oest’s archives, however, solicit a consideration of genre,
because it was their connection to the inchoate field of commercial architectural photography in
the city where the photography of public housing had an impact on modernist architecture and
design circles. Commercial architectural photographers commissioned by HACLA had their
work printed, most importantly, in Arts & Architecture, which already by the early 1940s was an
important source of information on architecture and design for professionals in the city. In other
words, architectural photography is where we see traces of the social reform discourse revolving
around public housing enter a diffuse culture of elite architectural design, planning culture, and
publication. What HACLA lent to architectural photography was an association with the leftist
politics with which it was associated. As Dana Cuff has elaborated, modern public housing,
influenced by European precedents, “inherently bred socialist utopian visions of a better city.”
179
The visual language that architectural photography of the public housing projects, then,
inherently became associated, for better or for worse, with the left-leaning views of its architects
and HACLA’s bureaucrats.
180
177
Ibid, 10.
178
Ibid, 11.
179
Cuff, Provisional Cities, 164.
180
This merely scratches the surface of the long, complex history of red-baiting in Los Angeles, spurred by real
estate lobbyists, that focused most of its attention in the early 1950s first and foremost on public housing. For more
see Cuff; Thomas Hines, “Housing, Baseball, and Creeping Socialism: The Battle of Chavez Ravine, 1949-1959,”
Journal of Urban History 8, no. 2 (February 1982): 123-143; Don Parson, Making a Better World: Public Housing,
the Red Scare, and the Direction of Modern Los Angeles (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
81
While preoccupation with genre has indeed imposed unnecessary gatekeeping on
photography histories, allowing only certain photographs to be considered in a given category,
without a critical evaluation of genre, these impositions are allowed to remain, and public
housing photography remains isolated from the wider visual culture of Los Angeles.
Architectural photography—encompassing both public housing photography, photography of
street scenes, and of architecture and interiors—developed as a distinct professional field in the
city because its photographers could illustrate the wide range of subjects associated with urban
development. It navigated the complexities of this pivotal moment in time for the city. I return to
genre in order to widen the scope of photography histories, demonstrating how understudied
practices contributed to photography’s social influence at key historical junctures.
The comparison section in Cities Are for People mirror another pictorial strategy used by
HACLA in their fourth annual report covering the period from July 1, 1941 to June 30, 1942.
Titled Home for Heroes and designed by Alvin Lustig the same year he worked on Cities Are for
People, the report is the Authority’s first to showcase a vanguard design and ample photographs
of residential architecture (fig. 1.28). The report’s first page features a red-and-white pinstripe
pattern punctuated once near the bottom right by a small photograph of the Dana Strand housing
complex, at the time war housing that would become public housing later (fig. 1.29). Its diagonal
crop at left, like one end of a parallelogram, is a signature playful choice of Lustig’s. But it also
serves to isolate focus on the one apartment structure shown. As if beaming in the sun, its white
façade stands out against the shadowy trees at left. The building appears well maintained and
surrounded by grass, its spaciousness on full display despite the small photograph. This isolated
portrait of the new public housing projects to be shown in the pamphlet demonstrates the
importance of both photography and its presentation in print to the efforts of HACLA. It further
82
allowed photographers such as Julius Shulman to showcase their architectural photography.
Figure 1.30 is most likely taken by Shulman and shows a handsome Canary Island date palm
framing the sun-soaked complex of Pueblo del Rio extending beyond it into the distance.
Combining the persistent Southern Californian iconography of the palm tree with the decisively
geometric and generic modern building form, Shulman experimented with how public housing
might model a new iconography for the city, one that did not have to reject the city’s booster
legacies.
In addition to explaining members’ jobs and how the Authority related to national
housing agencies, the publication highlights completed and planned public housing projects,
which were described proudly as “cities within cities.”
181
As an annual report was required by
the state for housing authorities’ funding, the largest section of the pamphlet is understandably
devoted to the past year of HACLA’s accomplishments. Lustig designed sixteen pages of before
and after photographic comparisons. Before-and-after photography has been a persistent trope
throughout photography’s history, relied upon to convey change over time, especially when the
change has taken place on one particular site.
182
Lustig’s comparisons are comprised of a dossier
of slum clearance accomplishments, of mostly Black and Mexican communities, with captioning
in the middle detailing building and material criteria (fig. 1.31). The comparative photographs,
however, do not cohere precisely – none of the “after” shots, placed on top, are taken from the
same spot or angle as the “before,” on the bottom, several of the projects are far from complete,
and the “before” shots vary in what is presented, from empty lot, to occupied neighborhood, to
construction site.
181
Roger C. Johnson, ed. Homes for Heroes: Fourth Annual Report of the Housing Authority of the City of Los
Angeles ([Los Angeles]: s.n., [1942?]). Copy at the Los Angeles City Archives and Records Center.
182
See Jordan Bear, Kate Albers, eds. Before-and-After Photography: Histories and Contexts (New York:
Routledge, 2017).
83
The report prefaces these comparisons with a defense of its use of primarily architectural
photographs:
Pictorial records offer the only satisfactory method for displaying what has been accomplished.
Photographs taken prior to, or in the early stages of, actual construction can be checked with other
pictures showing completed jobs.
183
In Homes for Heroes, the transformative labor of photography is enunciated through the
before-and-after model.
184
What is of interest is not the changes enacted on the site but the
viewer’s ability to see, to check between the two, and to understand that a picture facilitated this
change. The spread helps demonstrate the power of the before-and-after model of photography: it
did not matter precisely what is shown in each photographic comparison, the idea of
transformation pervaded. The interchangeability of subject matter further enforces what I suggest
was the broader appeal of commercial architectural photographs in planning culture.
Architectural photography provided formal and technical stability rather than a unified subject
matter. An “after” photograph, no matter its content, in a before-and-after dyad would always be
represented by and associated with an architectural photograph. The latter represented the
ultimate future and desired transformation of a site, achieved through consistent formal
standards, technical abilities, and orderly compositions.
In Cities Are for People, the comparison spreads in Chapter 7 are some of the more
graphically conservative in the entire book, as if Lustig and Scott felt the need to emphasize the
information visualized in the photos and eliminate any distractions caused by the graphic design.
In so doing, the photographs proved the ultimate utility of architectural photography: its subject
matter was less important than its ability to stand in as a proxy for change and futurity. The
183
Ibid; Nicole Oest, Photography and Modern Public Housing in Los Angeles (Heidelberg, Ger.: arthistoricum.net,
2021).
184
For more on the before-and-after model of photography in the context of Homes for Heroes, see Nicole Oest,
Photography and Modern Public Housing.
84
conventional page layouts and rather unexceptional photographs proposed a new image for Los
Angeles precisely because they were generic. If in Homes for Heroes the photographic
comparisons directly point to public housing, racial integration, and the political associations of
HACLA, in Cities Are for People, what filters through is only a general sense of concern for the
social dimension of city planning, one that can be easily divorced from any particular political
agenda. Los Angeles could be a model city for the future because, as Scott suggests, it mirrors
the problem of any other city. Its exceptionalism was no longer its strength in Cities Are for
People. Instead, architectural photography proposes a new urban iconography that does not
showcase the city’s unique skyline, architectural masterpieces, nor its people. It circulates
photographs of its most straightforward, unpeopled modern homes and housing complexes,
intermixed with other common street-level views to prove a sense of the city’s familiarity, as
seen in Shulman’s photograph of “unsightliness” in figure 1.22.
Cities Are for People ultimately does not assert any specific, action-based steps for
achieving a better sense of planning in Los Angeles. Nor did it intend to: in the book’s foreword,
Scott writes that, in Los Angeles, residents live “closer to the frontier of the imagination than
most people,” and that the book champions the aspirations of the majority, as one should in a
truly democratic society, rather than prescriptive, pragmatic plans of the few in charge.
185
This
approach proved a benefit to architectural photography and a disadvantage to the fate of
democratic planning initiatives in the city. For the photographic genre, projects such as Cities
Are for People launched men such as Shulman into a new realm of socially engaged architectural
photography, a reputation that would linger on even as their clientele grew wider and,
oftentimes, more elite. Most planning projects, by contrast, met their demise by the late 1940s,
185
Scott, Cities are for People, foreword.
85
throttled by anti-Communist movements and a new interest in consumer culture and the single-
family home.
186
Cities Are for People: Legacies
By the late 1940s, HACLA further committed to photography as an important tool for
their agendas. Frank Wilkinson, its public relations officer, hired photographer Leonard Nadel to
be HACLA’s staff photographer. By the early 1950s, Nadel had compiled for HACLA an
impressive body of photographs documenting Bunker Hill and Chavez Ravine before demolition.
He took conventional architectural photographs as well: he photographed Richard Neutra’s
Channel Heights war worker housing in 1950, creating orderly and dynamic portraits of the
buildings (fig. 1.32).
187
Nadel had gained Wilkinson’s attention through two unpublished
photobooks he created about Los Angeles public housing projects titled “Pueblo del Rio: The
Study of a Planned Community” and “Aliso Village, USA” in 1948 and 1949, respectively. Both
books are long, large-format investigations into the lives of residents and the effects of the
buildings on the communities, as seen through photography.
188
In “Pueblo del Rio” in particular,
Nadel attempts to rework documentary photography to create portraits of both buildings and
residents.
The first twenty-seven pages of “Pueblo del Rio,” which constitute part one of the book,
feature mostly unpeopled architectural photographs exposing the blighted conditions of Los
Angeles’s slums. Nadel adjusts compositional and framing approaches: in one photograph, he
186
Parson, Making a Better World.
187
Box 13, Leonard Nadel Photographs and other material relating to housing and urban redevelopment in Los
Angeles, 2002.M.42. Getty Research Institute; Dana Cuff, The Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture
an Urbanism (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001), 283.
188
Likely unknown to Nadel, one precedent to this type of photographic investigation into modern public housing
might be Ella Begmann-Michel’s photographic studies of Frankfurt modern housing settlements in the early 1930s.
See Megan Luke, “Our Life Together: Collective Homemaking in the films of Ella Bergmann-Michel,” Oxford Art
Journal 40, no. 1 (2017): 27-48.
86
juxtaposes the architecture of tenement structures against the backdrop of City Hall (fig. 1.33)
and on page 26 (fig. 1.34) shot through a door or window to contain the scene as if within a
picture frame. Across and positioned at top right on the page is juxtaposed a low angle shot
showing a much more chaotic view. Piles of building detritus lie in the bottom right foreground
and give way to a deteriorating wall, and an open ceiling frame, suggesting the roof may have
collapsed. From a room above the open roof, several children peek out, surveying the damage.
Many photographs in Part 1, furthermore, recall Jacob Riis’s expository photographs in How the
Other Half Lives: Nadel used a flash bulb to illuminate cramped conditions, poor appliances, and
a dirty living space.
Part II draws upon architectural photography to redeem the conditions depicted in Part I.
More than this, Nadel attempts to fuse architectural compositions with portraiture. We see these
genres meet on the first full-page photograph of Part II (fig. 1.35). Several children of different
races are gathered at the base of a building, covered in bright, direct sunlight, symbolizing the
racial integration HACLA aspired to achieve, street photography of a different sort. The Pueblo
del Rio administration building rises above them, an impressive expanse of white bricks that
extends dynamically out to the right. The sans serif futura font, the same chosen for Cities Are
for People, prominently announces both the building’s purpose and its devotion to modern
architectural form and style: the blank white façade and popular font together underscore the
unadorned functionality of the building.
189
189
The style of the building and its photographic representation did not depart significantly from representations of
new, modern public housing in other cities. Photographs from the 1940s of Chicago public housing, for instance,
emphasize the clean, expansive façades as well as the staged domesticity of duplex apartment units. See Arnold
Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1983).
87
The two subjects of the photograph, meant presumably to be read as one subject—the
transformed community—do not cohere, however. The children are dwarfed by the building;
they are under exposed and, thus, their expressions and faces are difficult to discern; some are in
blurred in motion and only one appears to notice the camera. Ensconced in shadows and their
own conversations with one another, the children appear more like props subservient to the
building than fully realized subjects of the photograph. The next two pages contain no human
subjects, only architecture. In one photograph (fig. 1.36), Nadel shoots through an extant slum
building. The catawampus boards crisscross chaotically across the frame, standing in stark
contrast to the orderly horizontal and vertical lines of the public housing complex seen through
the frame. We might understand the photograph to combine the model of the before and after
model. Here, we see through the ‘before’ to observe the already finished ‘after.’
The rest of Part II elaborates on the tension between human subjects and the formal order
of the modern architecture, punctuated by brief text captions. Certain photographs achieve a
provisional synthesis of Pueblo residents and the buildings. On page 51, Nadel photographed a
man lowering the American flag at the end of the day (fig. 1.37). The Pueblo buildings surround
the man in the courtyard, and a series of sprinklers create a gentle haze over the ground. The
flag, almost at center, triangulates the scene, and a line of dark palm trees at back punctuate the
scene and lend a quintessentially Californian symbolism. Towards the end of Part II, Nadel
seems to hit his stride capturing portraits of young adult residents using communal space for
dance, baseball, basketball, and football. Pages 94-95 show a group of young women in the
midst of dancing, forming a symmetrical semi-circle against the blank walls of a recreation room
(fig. 1.38). The opposite page shows a group of boys staring up at a basketball mid-air. Two boys
lunge upward in dramatic movement, their arms stretching to reach the ball. Unmistakably
88
behind them are the white walls of Pueblo del Rio, the building physically and symbolically
supporting the activity, rather than controlling it.
Claire Zimmerman and Eve Zimmerman have proposed the term “ethnographic
architectural photography” to describe photography of architecture that stands as a metonym for
a population or culture.
190
The term might help define what Nadel attempted to achieve in his
photobooks. A skilled photographer of architecture, Nadel was ultimately less interested in
capturing the architectural achievement of Pueblo Del Rio. Instead, he offered photographs of
the complexes as “a more lasting representation of an ethnic, or national, or regional, or urban
identity.”
191
Zimmerman and Zimmerman distinguish ethnographic architectural photography
from commercial photographic practices, the latter of which they consider advertising. In the
case of Nadel’s photobooks, as well as in Cities Are for People and in the housing authority’s
pamphlets, such boundaries were blurred. As the cultural purchase of social documentary
photography was waning in the United States at the same moment as commercial architectural
photography was brimming with a new industry of modern architecture, Nadel’s photography
might have been a way to reconcile the two. Why, then, did he never find an interested
publisher?
The books did not go unpublished for lack of effort on Nadel’s part. Nadel traveled to
New York and contacted dozens of magazine editors, publishers, and photographers to whom he
pitched his photobooks, taking meticulous notes on the outcome of each meeting. He met with
Roy Stryker, formerly the head of the information division of the Farm Security Administration
190
They locate the origins of this ethnographic architectural photography in European modernist photobooks from
the early twentieth century, including Paul Wolff’s Wohnung und Siedlung (1926), Kurt Hielscher’s Deutschland
Baukunst und Landschaft (1924), and Albert Renger-Patzsch’s Lü beck: achtzig photographische Aufnahmen (1928).
Claire Zimmerman and Eve Zimmerman, “Ethnographic architectural photography: Futagawa Yukio and Nihon no
minka,” The Journal of Architecture 20, no. 4 (2015): 718-750.
191
Ibid, 722.
89
and the founder of the documentary photography program who was at the time working for
Standard Oil on a documentary photography project. Stryker believed the photographs too local,
that a story on Los Angeles public housing would not attract national interest. Nadel remarked
that Stryker furthermore thought the book deserved more “rough treatment:” “does he mean it’s
too slick??” Nadel wondered.
192
Such feedback—both too local and too slick—intimates the
ways Nadel’s approach to photography had already fallen out of favor amongst editors and
publishers. For an architectural photography project, it focused too closely on the niche situation
of Los Angeles public housing residents and did not make a case for the importance or relevance
of the city as a place with a unique perspective on the issue. Moreover, by the late 1940s, public
housing was already under attack even as many of its most ambitious projects were underway: it
became the focal point of House Unamerican Activity Committee investigations only a few years
later.
193
From the perspective of a social documentary project, on the other hand, Nadel’s book
followed too closely those conventions of commercial architectural photography. With carefully
framed photographs highlighting the modern attributes of the public housing architecture,
Nadel’s book replicated those photographs populating the pages of architectural and shelter
magazines. The books brought Nadel success only insofar as they led him to become a HACLA
staff member. Nadel would go on to capture some of the most violent scenes of displacement in
the city, and his penchant for capturing blight and modern building would remain useful in this
new job, as both were document for internal and publicity purposes by HACLA.
192
Box 13, Leonard Nadel Photographs and other material relating to housing and urban redevelopment in Los
Angeles, 2002.M.42. Getty Research Institute.
193
See Dana Cuff, The Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism (The MIT Press, 2000);
Don Parson, Making a Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare, and the Direction of Modern Los Angeles
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
90
The way that architectural photography conveyed meaning found itself at an impasse, its
irreconcilable directions—towards documenter of the fight for affordable housing or toward the
commercial field of modern architecture and design—presaged in the pages of Cities Are for
People and confirmed in the lack of success of Nadel’s photobooks. Since Nadel’s approach did
not succeed, there was little chance that commercial architectural photography could retain its
heterogeneous purposes as seen in Cities Are for People.
We might understand the conceptual legacy of the architectural photography used in
Cities Are for People through the cover of another book by Mel Scott, Metropolitan Los Angeles:
One Community, published in 1949 and also designed by Alvin Lustig (fig. 1.39). The book was
intended as a follow-up to Cities are for People, meant for potential use as a high school
textbook covering planning and development in the region.
194
At first glance, Metropolitan Los
Angeles seems to abandon an interest in the potential of architectural photography to illustrate
planning problems. Gone are the Shulman photographs and, instead, the book includes many
more aerial and birds eye perspectives, insinuating period preferences for the abstraction and
morphology conveyed through them. Most of Lustig’s experimentations with graphic design
have been removed, with photographs more straightforwardly illustrating lengthier, and more
dense chapters. Yet the cover reveals that which the rest of the book belies: architectural
photography’s conceptual stakes still exerted an influence. The cover consists of three elements:
a sweeping night photograph of the illuminated valley of Los Angeles, taken from high above on
a hill; a sparse, robin’s egg blue map of the city; and a rectangular, vertical bar that bisects the
right third of the photograph. The bar plays tricks on the photograph: it superimposes the same
194
Scott had initially planned to revise Cities are for People in lieu of writing a new book, but changed course when
it seemed that the changes of the past seven years warranted an entirely new project. Scott, “Preface,” Metropolitan
Los Angeles (Los Angeles: The Haynes Foundation, 1949).
91
blue of the map onto the sliver of photograph and, below, it reproduces that same section of the
photograph, which remains in black and white.
This cover does not feature an architectural photograph; I suggest, however, that if this
vertical bar is only a graphic intervention, it also stands in conceptually as an architectural frame.
This photograph, with the help of Lustig’s design, showcases a formal convention of
architectural photography that would come to dominate in many magazines because it
exemplified the genre’s appeal: it shows how a house can frame a view, and control the
appearance of an entire city (fig. 1.40). Unlike Nadel’s “Pueblo del Rio,” gone are any views of
human subjects or influence of social documentary photography practices. Yet its presence on
the cover of a book advocating for democratic, progressive urban planning gifted to this
photograph an implicit concern for the social improvement, even from its position perched high
atop the city below. As the next chapter will show, magazines in effect retrieved the potential of
architectural photography in Cities Are for People and, later, in Metropolitan Los Angeles. The
magazine Arts & Architecture helped to cultivate a style and formal appeal of architectural
photography of vanguard, modern projects that depended on its roots in both planning culture
and social documentary influences. Ultimately, Cities Are for People constituted an important
experiment with photographic form because, within it, architectural photographs asserted social
concern regardless of their subject matter. It showed how the fundamental building blocks of a
photograph—its composition, exposure, and style—shaped the political associations of an entire
book project and an entire photographic genre. Architectural photography was developing an
expertise for conveying arguments through formal detail without needing to provide visual
evidence.
92
Chapter 2—Architectural Photography’s Search for a Subject in Arts & Architecture
Magazine, 1940-1967
In the middle of architectural photographer Julius Shulman’s first book, Photographing
Architecture and Interiors (1961), is a full-page photograph of a house by architect Raphael
Soriano (fig. 2.1). The photograph highlights what would become a classic staple of both
Shulman’s architectural photography and midcentury modern architecture in California: strong
contrasts of light create abstract, planar shapes out of the house’s façade and roof and the
photograph allows a straight view down the house’s open hallway, which gives way to a smooth
transition between indoor and outdoor space. Staged with furniture and flowers, the photograph
also contains a prominently placed copy of the Los Angeles-based Arts & Architecture magazine
(1942-1967), its black and white cover accentuated as it sits alone on a wide table in the
foreground.
195
Why might Shulman have included a copy of Arts & Architecture in his book? The
photographer’s career was certainly indebted to the magazine for commissions and exposure
early in his career: its longtime editor John Entenza gave him his first cover photograph, and
featured his photography in almost every issue, exposing Shulman to the modern architecture
and design professionals who subscribed.
196
Yet the relationship between Los Angeles
architectural photographers and Arts & Architecture was more than financial, with the latter
financially supporting the former. Through Arts & Architecture, architectural photography
developed a distinct and paradigmatic style, one that chronicled the most important and vanguard
195
Arts & Architecture Magazine 71, no. 3 (March 1954).
196
Shulman has downplayed the influence of the magazine in jump starting his career by saying his work was
already circulating internationally by the time Entenza took over the editorship but does acknowledge the prominent
role that Entenza and the magazine played in his professional career. Julius Shulman, “Oral history Interview with
Julius Shulman,” interview by Taina Rikala de Noriega. January 12–February 3, 1990. Archives of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution.
93
modernist architecture and design being produced in Los Angeles. The genre became nearly
synonymous with the glamorous, aspirational lifestyles cultivated through Arts & Architecture
and other magazines. The magazine also provided a venue through which architectural
photography illustrated a diverse range of texts fretting over and providing solutions for the
city’s appearance and future development. Yet at the height of architectural photography’s
reputation, Arts & Architecture’s editors also used the genre to elicit questions about urban
representation and the role of magazines in changing cities for the better. Shulman’s photograph,
then, stands as proof of the embeddedness of Arts & Architecture in the development of
architectural photography in Los Angeles. As I will show, neither could have risen to the height
of their simultaneously glamorous and avant-garde reputation without the other.
This chapter revisits Arts & Architecture, a popular subject in architectural and design
histories, to take a closer look at commercial architectural photography’s role throughout its
tenure. It chronicles how Arts & Architecture produced and circulated a representation of Los
Angeles that cast aside the city’s booster identity defined through its connection to what historian
Carey McWilliams deemed its “Spanish fantasy heritage” and advanced, instead, Los Angeles as
a site of international experimentations in modernism.
197
Visually and rhetorically reinventing a
city is no easy task, however, and the magazine’s stakeholders failed to produce a unifying thesis
of why and how the city needed conceptual, ideological, or practical reinvention. I argue that the
magazine’s editors used commercial architectural photography to visualize this new Los
Angeles, defined almost exclusively through photographs of modernist buildings, in order to
defer more extensive and practical reckoning with the future of the city. They did so without
197
Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pierce, 1946), 21.
94
considering the consequences of photography of buildings acting as the representation of the city
in its entirety. As such, the magazine left the subject of Los Angeles unresolved, its spreads
never advanced a clear answer for how photography could convey urban identity.
The chapter first considers how commercial architectural photography acted as the
magazine’s primary source of illustration but also provoked questions about the stakes of
photography faithfully representing its subjects’ perspective. I consider lesser-known spreads
from the magazine to challenge scholarship that narrowly focuses on the magazine’s Case Study
House program as its primary contribution to midcentury design culture. I furthermore explore
the community of professional photographers, designers, architects, and writers brought together
through Arts & Architecture who collectively shaped the trajectory of commercial architectural
photography as a profession, as well as the way photography transmitted meaning about
architecture, urbanism, and art in the magazine.
Cultivated over nearly thirty years, Arts & Architecture’s ambivalent relationship towards
photography and its purpose in the publication had consequences for the reputation of
commercial architectural photography among architecture professionals and the general public.
By the magazine’s later years, a new generation of architects and urban theorists rose to
prominence in architecture and design fields by studying and celebrating the vernacular, pop
culture-infused chaos of American cities, often focusing on Los Angeles as a paradigm of what
they considered to be the postmodern cityscape of billboards, automobiles, and mismatched
architectures. They illustrated their book studies with experimental, street-level photography
often taken by artists.
198
Under these conditions, commercial architectural photography’s role
198
See Ed Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip; Kevin Lynch’s photography of Los Angeles in Lynch, The
Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1960). Reyner Banham would continue this trend, see Banham,
Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).
95
was unclear: could it illustrate a new generation’s ideas for the city? Or was it stuck in its
identity cultivated through Arts & Architecture? The chapter concludes with this dilemma,
suggesting the end of Arts & Architecture provoked an identity crisis for commercial
architectural photography: although it lost its appeal to architecture, design, and arts
professionals interested in the future of Los Angeles, it developed new appeal to artists and art
photographers concerned with the city as their subject.
My chapter joins a growing body of scholarship focused on magazines and periodicals as
key sites through which to revise dominant understandings of how and where modernism was
enacted in the United States.
199
Scholars of American art history have shown how, in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century, the space of the magazine page catalyzed commercial
artists to experiment across subject matter with reproduction, perception, and the nature of
representation through illustration.
200
In the second half of the twentieth century, however,
magazine studies diverge; photography historians have focused on TIME and Life, American art
199
Thierry Gervais, The Making of Visual News: A History of Photography in the Press (London: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2017); Donal Harris, On Company Time: American Modernism in the Big Magazines (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2016); Daniel Díez Martínez, “ADS & ARTS & ARCHITECTURE: La publicidad de la
revista Arts & Architecture en la construcción de la imagen de las arquitecturas del sur de California (1938-1967),”
Ph.D. Thesis (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 2016); Mark Morrisson, “Beyond Little Magazines: American
Modernism and the Turn to Big Magazines,” The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 11, no. 1 (2020): 1–24;
Marie-Madeleine Ozdoba, 'Tomorrow’s Life Today'. Le mythe de l’architecture ultra-moderne dans la presse
américaine (1947-1964),” Temps des Médias, no. 24 (2020): 272-274. Recent scholarship at the intersection of
periodical studies and digital art history, moreover, has made important strides in addressing the dearth of data on
magazine circulation. Brooks Hefner and Edward Timke have shown how improved knowledge of circulation can
nuance the artificial dichotomy of big and little magazines in the United States and show the overlaps and
similarities between many periodicals. Hefner and Timke, “Beyond Little and Big: Circulation, Data, and American
Magazine History,” The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 11, no. 1 (2020): 25-51.
200
Jennifer Greenhill, “Flip, Linger, Glide: Coles Phillips and the Movements of Magazine Pictures,” Art History
40, no. 3 (June 2017): 582-611; Emily Hage, “The Magazine as Readymade: New York Dada and the Transgression
of Genre and Gender Boundaries,” The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 3, no. 2 (2012): 175-97; Mark S.
Morrison, ed. The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905-1920 (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2001); Christopher P. Wilson, “The Rhetoric of Consumption: Mass-Market
Magazines and the Demise of the Gentle Reader, 1880-1920” in Richard Wightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears, eds,
The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History 1880-1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983),
39-64.
96
historians on postwar experimental artist publications, and architectural magazines generally the
purview of architectural historians.
201
I contend that Arts & Architecture can further expose the
shared investments in photography between magazines that have been unnecessarily separated in
scholarship.
Architectural photography’s aesthetic of American glamour is historicized as its most
important contribution to postwar visual culture, evidenced most recently in Taschen’s complete
reprint of the publication beginning with issues in 1945 into ten limited-edition volumes.
202
What
this chapter demonstrates, however, is that not only were architectural photographers producing a
much more diverse stylistic and aesthetic range of photographs, but the very modernist glamour
of which architectural photographs provide evidence was in fact under scrutiny and
experimentation by both photographers and editors. Arts & Architecture created a site and
printed space in which the idea of Los Angeles as a modern, changing city could be questioned,
reworked, and proposed anew through photographs.
“As Flat as a Tortilla and as Sleek as a Bugatti”
203
Located at 3305 Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, Arts & Architecture was no ordinary
architecture magazine. It was dedicated to sharing a holistic vision of the vanguard architecture,
201
For a selection, see Gwen Allen, Artists' Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art (Cambridge: The MIT Press,
2011); Katherine A. Bussard and Kristen Gresh, eds. Life Magazine and the Power of Photography (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Art Museum, 2020); Sarah Dreller, “Architectural Forum, 1932-64: A Time Inc. Experiment in
American Architecture and Journalism,” PhD diss., 2015. University of Illinois, Chicago; Thierry Gervais, The
Making of Visual News: A History of Photography in the Press (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).
202
Alice Friedman, American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2010); Rebecca Peabody, et al, eds. Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles Art, 1945-1980 (Los Angeles: Getty
Publications, 2011); Cervin Robinson and Joel Hershman, Architecture Transformed: A History of the Photography
of Buildings (Cambridge, MA, New York: The MIT Press, Architectural League of New York, 1987).
Joseph Rosa, A Constructed View: The Architectural Photography of Julius Shulman. (New York: Rizzoli, 1994).
David Travers, ed. Arts and Architecture 1945-54: The Complete Reprint (Köln: Taschen, 2008).
203
Esther McCoy’s description of the magazine retrospectively. McCoy, “Arts & Architecture Case Study Houses,”
in Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses, Elizabeth A.T. Smith, ed.
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1989), 16.
97
design, and visual arts being produced in the city and contextualizing Los Angeles’s
achievements through international modern architecture. Throughout its tenure, its circulation
remained low, hovering somewhere around 8,500 copies per month during Entenza’s reign and
around 12,500 during his successor, David Travers’ editorship.
204
By contrast, other United
States-based architecture magazines such as Architectural Forum, AIA Journal, and Progressive
Architecture boasted between 40,000 to 50,000 copies monthly.
205
In spite of this, it retained a
loyal and dedicated audience over the years including internationally, and architectural critic
David Gebhard believed it was the magazine “most often found in the foreign architect’s
office.”
206
Formed in 1929 through the merger of Pacific Coast Architect and California
Southland, the magazine began as California Arts & Architecture.
207
Throughout the 1930s, the
publication’s editors published similar material and layouts to magazines such as Architectural
Digest, which focused on “regional” styles of architecture and other cultural issues in line with
decades-long booster literature on Southern California (fig. 2.2). Arts & Architecture
occasionally showcased the incipient modern architecture and design in the city in several issues
during the 1930s, before Entenza’s editorship.
208
The January 1935 issue, for example, focused
204
David Travers, “About Arts & Architecture,” Arts & Architecture website,
http://www.artsandarchitecture.com/about.html.
205
Donna Batten, ed., Gale Directory of Publications and Broadcast Media (Farmington Hills, Michigan: Gale,
Cengage Learning, 2017).
206
David Gebhard,“The Case Study Houses.” ArtForum 2, No. 4 (October 1963): 24.
207
Pacific Coast Architect was founded in 1911, and California Southland 1918.
208
Because Entenza’s tenure began just a year before America’s entrance into World War II, the stylistic changes
wrought by wartime necessity became conflated into analyses of his editorial decision making, an elision that should
be questioned especially because Entenza’s archive is presumed lost, and thus very little exists concerning the
particularities of his role. See Barbara Goldstein, Arts & Architecture: The Entenza Years (Los Angeles: Hennessey
& Ingalls, 1990); Elizabeth A.T. Smith, Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study
Houses. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1989).
98
on the “contemporary movement in architecture which is called ‘modern.’”
209
Its cover featured
a lithograph of the Hoover Dam by William Woolett (fig. 2.3), situating the issue on the scale of
monumental federal infrastructure projects. The editor’s note that month, titled “California As
We See It,” acclimated readers to new architectures by contextualizing them in relation to the
state’s existing architectures and by invoking a nativist argument for modern architecture arising
out of quintessentially Californian environmental characteristics.
210
Prior to Entenza’s editorship,
modern architecture emerged gradually and unevenly because it was folded into issues still
highlighting regional revival styles and ranch houses.
211
Residential architecture—primarily single-family homes—comprised the largest category
of building shown, but throughout its run Arts & Architecture also included many other
architectural projects, including commercial storefronts, factory buildings, housing for factory
workers, public housing, office buildings, experimental structures, and the occasional skyscraper.
An unassuming yet well-designed single-family home in Louisiana could be featured a few
pages after a progress report on the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO) headquarters building in Paris.
212
Setting itself apart from magazines focused solely on architecture, from the late 1930s
until its last issue in August 1967 Arts & Architecture included several core columns: Art,
Music, Notes in Passing (the editor’s letter), and a varying number of individual architectural
209
California Arts & Architecture 47, no. 1 (January 1935): 2.
210
The issue also carefully laid out its descriptors, distinguishing the term modern as that which “is organic, based
upon principles of structure and spirit profoundly realized,” and an “authentic voice.
”
211
John Entenza’s immediate influence on the magazine was most apparent through graphic design and typography
rather than through photography. Several designers over the years can be credited with shaping the dynamic and
innovative layout and cover of the magazine, including Robin Park, the long-serving art director, Herbert Matter,
and Alvin Lustig, a graphic designer who also art directed the magazine briefly and whose design was featured on
several covers.
212
Arts & Architecture 75, no. 2 (February 1958).
99
projects written about by in-house staff. There were many columns that rotated in and out over
the years, including Cinema, Double Talk (political commentary), the State Association of
California Architects Bulletin, Builders of the West, Textiles, Ceramics, Jewelry, and Products
of the West. The advertisements tended to feature companies whose products were used in
projects featured throughout the publication, furthering the discerning and selective aura that the
magazine tried to cultivate.
Several editors headed the magazine during the 1930s. Jere Johnson became publisher in
1936 and took over the editorship from Mark Daniels in early 1938.
213
When Johnson needed a
temporary editor to run the magazine while she was on maternity leave in 1940, she handed
business over to John Entenza. By May of the same year, Entenza, under slightly dubious
circumstances, became the permanent editor and owner of the publication.
214
My study on the
magazine begins at the end of Johnson’s editorship, when Entenza overhauled the design and
direction of the magazine, dropping “California” from its masthead and with the help of graphic
designers Herbert Matter and Alvin Lustig (fig. 2.4), began featuring experimental cover and
interior graphic designs and revealing Entenza’s interest in modernist, International Style
architecture. The magazine also began engaging in new ways with the urban landscape of Los
Angeles: it increased the quantity of architectural photography shown, it began advertising new
public housing projects, and it demonstrated a new focus on how to amend and improve cities.
213
Before Mark Daniels, George Oyer edited the magazine. Before becoming editor, Johnson had served as the
magazine’s secretary. John Crosse, “California Arts & Architecture: A Steppingstone to Fame: Harwell Hamilton
Harris and John Entenza: Two Case Studies,” Southern California Architectural History blog, May 31, 2010,
https://socalarchhistory.blogspot.com/2010/05/.
214
Numerous sources on California Arts & Architecture misattribute 1938 as the year Entenza supposedly took
over control of the magazine from Johnson. Historian John Crosse has hypothesized that Entenza, with help of his
attorney father, manipulated or pressured Johnson to sell the publication. Her last edited issue was January 1940.
John Crosse, “California Arts & Architecture: A Steppingstone to Fame: Harwell Hamilton Harris and John
Entenza: Two Case Studies,” Southern California Architectural History blog, May 31, 2010.
https://socalarchhistory.blogspot.com/2010/05/california-arts-architecture.html
100
Through these changes, Arts & Architecture quickly became a distinctive publication, setting
itself apart from booster and trade magazines, and it did so through a creative experimentation
with photography and graphic design.
Arts & Architecture is perhaps best remembered for its Case Study House program,
officially announced by Entenza in January 1945, which ran through 1967. The initiative, which
began as a design competition, was premised on the urgent need post-World War II for cost-
effective housing solutions. Entenza intended for architects in the city to build model homes in
Los Angeles that could act as blueprints for modern building across the country. The program
produced thirty-six innovative and provocative houses and apartment buildings.
While scholars
do not overstate the significance of the program, they tend to promote the idea that Arts &
Architecture’s entire postwar focus was the Case Study Houses.
215
Historians of architecture,
interior design, and graphic design have celebrated the magazine for the array of California
products and professionals featured in the magazine.
216
Its covers, moreover, have served as
paradigmatic examples of a distinctly Californian graphic design style, one premised on
biomorphic, organic abstractions, and a bold array of whimsical colors (fig. 2.5). While valuable
to understand in broad strokes the way that the magazine contributed to the idea of California
modernism, my account returns to the published photography; it produced a different notion of
California, and specifically Los Angeles, identity in ways that trouble the notion of a unifying
idea of West Coast modernism.
215
See Thomas Hines, Architecture of the Sun: Los Angeles Modernism, 1900-1970. New York: Rizzoli, 2010);
Elizabeth A.T. Smith, Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses. Los Angeles:
Museum of Contemporary Art, 1989); Elizabeth A. T., ed. Case Study Houses. The Complete CSH Program 1945-
1966 (Köln: Taschen, 2002).
216
Wendy Kaplan and Bobbye Tigerman. California Design, 1930-1965: Living in a Modern Way (Cambridge: The
MIT Press, 2011).
101
Historian Alice Friedman has disputed the pervasive reputation of modern U.S.
architecture for “empty formalism” and “conceptual oversimplification.” By contrast, she argues,
such architecture “suggested populist and distinctly American challenges to the conceptual
framework of European modernism.”
217
This chapter takes up Friedman’s prompt to challenge
dominant understandings of modernism in the United States by asking how photography
represented such modern architecture, design, and culture. In the same way that the architecture
itself did not produce merely an empty formalism, neither did photography, although it is often
blamed for circulating just such an image. Both Kim Beil and Suzanne Newbury have returned to
the original contexts of iconic midcentury photographs of the Case Study House program to
show that both the austere black-and-white reputation of modernism and the sleek, posed
glamorous reputation belie the heterogeneity of photographs circulated and the heterogeneity of
modern architecture.
218
In 1955, journalist Esther McCoy was already noting Arts & Architecture’s reach: she
wrote that it “is considered here and abroad to be the one most important architectural magazine
in the United States. It has a very select readership and its influence is great.”
219
The
idiosyncratic magazine shared characteristics with several contemporaneous magazines
important in the 1930s and throughout the following decades, including architecture magazines,
home magazines targeted at women advertising domesticity such as Good Housekeeping and
House Beautiful, picture magazines such as LIFE and Look, and magazines aimed at selling the
California lifestyle, such as Westways, the Los Angeles Times’s Home magazine, and Sunset
217
Friedman, American Glamour, 12.
218
Kim Beil, “The Myth of Black and White Modernism: Color Photographs and the Politics of Retrojective
Looking,” Visual Resources 31, no. 3-4 (2015): 127-53; Suzanna Phillips Newbury, The Speculative City: Art, Real
Estate, and the Making of Global Los Angeles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021).
219
Esther McCoy, Letter to Bert Finkel, 1955. McCoy Archives, Archives of American Art.
102
Magazine. Although it presented architectural projects with the same meticulous detail and rigor
as trade publications, Arts & Architecture’s expanded coverage of arts, sculpture, and speculative
writing on cities and urbanism exceeded the parameters of publications made primarily for
professionals in the field such as Architectural Forum or European publications such as
L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui.
220
Arts & Architecture also significantly reduced its length and the
breadth of its coverage compared to such publications: it ran around 36 pages long (its longest
issue was 80 pages), whereas the more successful architecture magazines such as Forum, which
attracted more advertisers, ran anywhere between 150 to 300 pages. Indeed, the dearth of
advertising in Arts & Architecture accounted for a major difference in appearance between it and
other architecture magazines: there were fewer advertisements to wade through between
editorials, giving the magazine a more unified appearance despite its lack of finances. Although
it featured art photography occasionally, it did not include photography by amateurs nor did it
aim to teach publics about how to photograph, as was the case in camera magazines. Its coverage
of modernist and International Style architecture antagonized editors of home magazines, notably
Elizabeth Gordon of House Beautiful.
221
220
The closest conceptual model to Arts & Architecture was a little magazine published within Architectural Forum
called Plus. The short-lived journal – there were only three issues published – ran from December 1938 to May
1939 and included articles and graphic contributions by vanguard architects and artists. As Sarah Dreller has noted,
its experimental and idiosyncratic content and design were highly unpopular amongst Forum’s readers, which is
why the magazine stopped supporting the supplement. Sarah Dreller, “Architectural Forum, 1932-64: A Time Inc.
Experiment in American Architecture and Journalism.” PhD Diss. (University of Illinois, Chicago, 2015).
221
Gordon, known for her conservatism and anti-communism, repeatedly went on tirades against the cold,
communistic architecture present in Entenza’s Arts & Architecture. As legend goes, she also refused to work with
Shulman because of his association with Entenza and the magazine. For more on the conflict between the two
magazines, see Jennifer Watts, ed. Maynard L. Parker: Modern Photography and the American Dream (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press in association with the Huntington Library, 2012).
103
Unlike “big” magazines, Arts & Architecture always ran on a shoestring budget and
depended on the generosity of its most loyal contributors for much of its content.
222
Yet Arts &
Architecture was not a little magazine, in the common understanding of the term. Used first to
describe a group of early-twentieth-century literary magazines, the term little magazine has been
used to describe a wide range of publications that were noncommercial, independently run, with
small circulations.
223
Yet architectural historian Beatriz Colomina has remarked that most
magazines have had their “moments of littleness.”
224
Indeed, Arts & Architecture flirted with
littleness throughout its tenure, as it struggled with circulation and obtaining advertisers, and its
editors experimented with how to engage with local Los Angeles culture through international
vanguard theories of modernism. This chapter contends with the magazine’s shifting identities
and desires to influence art and architecture on both larger and smaller scales than was possible.
One of the main differences between Arts & Architecture and other magazines that
circulated a wide variety of photography, such as LIFE, was that it never developed a robust
cadre of paid staff photographers. While for over eighteen years the magazine credited staff
photographers who, over time, included Julius Shulman, Harry Baskerville, Ralph Samuels, and
Margaret Lowe, these contributors were never paid a salary. Most of its photography was
sourced from photographs already taken by architectural firms, who would send in a dossier of
photography of new projects, in effect dictating much of the photographic content presented in
the magazine. Even when it came to the Case Study House program, there was only as much
222
When Entenza sold Arts & Architecture to Travers in 1962, Travers estimated Entenza was losing about one
thousand dollars a month on its publication. David Travers, Interviewed by Daniel Díez Martínez. Martinéz, “ADS
& ARTS & ARCHITECTURE.”
223
Suzanne W. Churchill, “Making Space for "Others": A History of a Modernist Little Magazine,” Journal of
Modern Literature 22, no. 1 (1998): 47-67.
224
Beatriz Colomina and Craig Buckley, eds., Clip, Stamp, Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines,
196X - 197X (New York: Actar, 2010), 8.
104
money as its sponsors could provide (mostly building material suppliers and other construction
companies), and this did not leave much money for photography. Indeed, Shulman even devised
a plan with the magazine’s advertising manager Bob Cron to take free photographs of the
products used in the Case Study House and to request sponsorship to the companies on the basis
of the product photographs taken.
225
Articles in Arts & Architecture always included more than one photograph.
226
The
architectural photography in Arts & Architecture encompassed six compositional paradigms.
First, the photographs used the physical frames of the architecture in order to frame views from
outside the buildings, thus creating images within images (fig. 2.6). Second, the photographs
presented houses and other buildings in isolation from surrounding residences, streets, or
buildings (fig. 2.7). Third, photographs showed the relationship between interiors and exteriors,
advertising both the openness of interiors surrounded by floor-to-ceiling glass windows and the
hybridity of living possible in modern houses (fig. 2.8). Fourth, both low angle shots and
photographs taken with wide-angle lenses were imperative to elongating and dramatizing the
horizontal roof lines, making them appear as if extending far beyond the individual project and
into the great beyond (fig. 2.9).
227
Fifth, commercial, residential, and experimental structures
were often shown in long shots, their horizontality emphasized in relationship to an expansive
skyline (fig. 2.10). Finally, architectural photography showed buildings under construction. In all
the Case Study House projects, for instance, construction photographs would introduce readers to
225
Shulman claims that he worked closely on the Case Study House publicity program with advertising manager
Bob Cron. Julius Shulman, “Oral history Interview with Julius Shulman,” interview by Taina Rikala de Noriega.
January 12–February 3, 1990. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
226
During World War II, photographs of projects in general were sparse due to a slowing of building. Many
photographers moreover were serving in the army.
227
Less frequently the magazine did include frontal shots of building façades, often for commercial structures, that
mimicked elevation drawings.
105
the building in issues before the final house was shown, appealing for the magazine’s
professional audiences and advertisers in the construction industry (fig. 2.11). Architectural
photography thus provided the forum for seeing a building in multiple forms at multiple stages of
its production.
Although Julius Shulman is often the primary photographer associated with the
magazine, over the course of its publication, it featured over forty architectural photographers on
its California architectural features, and several more for national and international projects, and
showcased the growing community of professional architectural photographers working in
Southern and Northern California, including Robert Cleveland, Roger Sturtevant, Morley Baer,
Maynard Parker, and Leland Lee. This was not unusual: magazines were some of architectural
magazine’s biggest clients, and they would pay photographers for single prints of buildings they
had already shot. It became, in fact, a major source of contention among photographers, who felt
taken advantage of by magazines. As the primary form of visual illustration for many
professional architectural magazines and more popular home magazines, moreover, commercial
architectural photography and its success depended largely on its standardization,
recognizability, and appeal across audiences. While Shulman is often associated with a style of
architectural photography associated in particular with Los Angeles, many other photographers
were producing similar photographs that, in many cases, look so alike that it is impossible to
determine off appearance alone which to which photographer it belongs.
Like many magazines, Arts & Architecture presents certain methodological problems as
an object of study. There is not a robust picture archive associated with the magazine, nor
significant records of correspondence between photographers and editors. Its longest serving
editor Entenza’s archive is lost, and much of the records that do exist of the magazine, at the
106
Archives of American Art, mostly consist of proofs for spreads to be published and submissions
sent to the publication that were ultimately unpublished. As such, I focus on published content
rather than archival records to understand what the photographs have to tell us about
photography and its relationship to architecture, rather than what they have to tell us only about
the details of the architecture and design pictured.
Experimenting with Architectural Photography
Despite a gradual erasure of the most obvious regional symbols, Arts & Architecture
retained Los Angeles as a subject, both visually and ideologically. Although often abstract
graphic designs, its covers also frequently featured photographs showing various sites in L.A.
Occasionally covers would showcase art photography, such as July 1938’s cover of a eucalyptus
tree. In January 1941, the magazine featured a photograph by acclaimed photographer Edward
Weston, shot on the Metro Goldwyn Mayer film studio lot in Los Angeles in 1938 (fig. 2.12) as
part of Weston and wife Charis Wilson West’s larger photography book project on California.
228
The photograph shows a massive pile of architectural objects: a portion of a staircase faces us
near the right corner of the frame. The wooden boards, ladders, railings, and other detritus rise in
a jumbled mass towards the sky, appearing structurally questionable but not altogether
precarious. Two electrical poles in the background blend into the architectural components
dominating the frame, as if everything surrounding the structure contributed to its integrity. The
foregrounded bright staircase draws attention, a focal point from which to start unpacking the
228
After receiving a fellowship from the Guggenheim Museum in 1937 – the first photographer ever given a grant
by the institution – Weston and his wife Charis Wilson Weston embarked on a two-year-long journey around
California and other western states which culminated in the 1940 book California and the West, with photos by
Weston and text by Wilson. Merle Armitage, a local art collector and author, had become an advisor to California
Arts & Architecture in 1933 and had been a regular supporter of Weston’s, possibly the reason Weston ended up
featured multiple times in the magazine. John Crosse, “The Sands of Time: The Oceano Dunes and the Westons,”
November 3, 2010. https://socalarchhistory.blogspot.com/2010/11/oceano-dunes-and-westons.html.
107
order of what we might call a jumbled piece of architecture. Yet this is the precise spot where the
composition disintegrates back into random material components. Nonetheless, Weston frames
the structure so that we can view it in its entirety. The prominently placed staircase draws our
eye into the mess, and the photograph reveals how each component part is related to another.
That the construction itself does not cohere is not Weston’s problem; he has faithfully given us a
sense of its material and formal character. Indeed, Weston attended to the form and composition
of his subject with the care and attention to detail of an architectural photographer.
While Weston’s MGM photographs have been characterized as the book project’s sole
satires—searing commentary on the façades and veneer of movie-making Hollywood culture—
the stance of the cover photograph seems unclear, especially in the context of an architecture
magazine.
229
The issue included a longer article about Weston as a photographer, written by
Wilson under the pseudonym F.H. Halliday. The review advocated for Weston’s photographic
vision as a corrective account of California: Weston’s California “has nothing to do with orange
groves with snowcapped mountains as a backdrop, or mission ruins restored, or art colonies or
Hollywood.”
230
Weston & Wilson’s project exposed a greater audience to the potentials of
photography as an art in their new approach to representing California, stripped from its booster
identifiers, signaling the state as a place for vanguard experimentation with photography. Arts &
Architecture both praised the body of work for having “nothing to do” with Hollywood but also
conscientiously chose a photo of Hollywood’s space where the studios manufactured fantasy
spaces to serve as a cover.
229
John Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution: A Cultural History of Thirties Photography (Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 2006).
230
California Arts & Architecture, 58 (January 1941): 8.
108
It might seem, then, that the cover photo is a playful response to the usual modernist
buildings featured on covers and throughout the magazine, characterized by their uninterrupted
perspectival lines, clean expanses of volume and orderly play of light and shadow, a stark
contrast to the bric-a-brac of Weston’s subject. I suggest another reading, however. Weston’s
cover photograph turns our attention to the act of photographing buildings. The boundaries that
have separated commercial architectural photography from other genres of photography—in this
case, art photography—are disregarded by using this photograph on this cover.
231
What does it
mean for architectural photography, however, given that Weston was never a professional
architectural photographer?
Architect Richard Neutra, his own designs a frequent subject in Arts & Architecture,
wrote the foreword to Shulman’s first book and mentioned Weston as a figure against whom to
define architectural photography. “My beloved late Edward Weston,” Neutra wrote, “was no
architectural photographer! Innocently he fell in love with stunning cracks in buckly plaster. His
wonderful photos could have served as evidence in court against a plastering contractor.”
232
Neutra argued that, by contrast, architectural photography was an “applied” art, one that served
its purpose through fidelity to its subject’s overall appearance and purpose. If Weston was a
photographer of “stunning cracks” and making art out of the detail, no matter how significant to
the design, architectural photography was about selecting the essential qualities of a design.
231
Raeburn, who has given the most thorough account of the Westons’ book, separates the motives of the MGM
photos from the rest of the book’s photographs. “In virtually every way Hollywood as an economic, social, and
artistic institution represented everything Weston despised.” 273 and “Both MGM pictures underline these contrasts
by virtue of the distance that separates them from the book’s preceding photographs. Everything on the movie lots is
counterfeit, and their elements register no discernable relationship to one another. Neither is it possible to imagine
what lies beyond the frame’s edges, a hermeticism his compositions emphasize by interior framing devices.”
Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution: A Cultural History of Thirties Photography (Champaign, IL: University of
Illinois Press, 2006), 274.
232
Richard Neutra, “The Photographer and Architect,” in Julius Shulman, Photographing Architecture and
Interiors (New York: Whitney Publications, 1962), vii.
109
While published twenty years after the Weston cover, Neutra’s essay gives insight about the way
photographers and architects attempted to define the field of commercial architectural
photography as a distinct professional venture. Commercial architectural photography could be
relied upon by clients, above all else, to communicate information about its subject, Shulman
argued. It could become a work of art only if it succeeded in its first purpose. But it also had the
potential, if it executed its first purpose correctly, to “transcend the mere physical recording” by
evoking “empathy,” giving it a creativity and freedom that transformed it into a work of art.
233
Art critic Clement Greenberg highlighted photographs by Weston, including the
California work from which the January 1941 cover was pulled, to discuss the role of subject
matter in photography.
234
Photography, Greenberg remarked, had always striven to transcend to
the level of art, but recently the means by which it attempted to achieve this were
questionable.
235
He was especially disturbed by the lack of differentiation between forms within
photographs, which transformed them into homogenized surfaces that devolved, in the worst
case, into pure pattern.
Weston failed as a photographer, argued Greenberg, because of his “lack of interest in
subject matter.” Weston’s least offensive photographs to Greenberg, however, were those from
the MGM studio lot sets. As completed architectural façades, the sets forced the photographer to
give a comprehensive view of the scene: “the smoothly painted surfaces prevent that eye from
233
Julius Shulman, Photographing Architecture and Interiors (New York: Whitney Publications, 1962), 2.
234
Greenberg’s limited analyses of photography have been mostly uninterrogated because of his supposed
disinterest in the medium, as cited in his argument that photography was a literary or narrative art, completely
distinct from painting or other vanguard visual art forms. His reviews however have great value for further
understanding how a preeminent theorist of painting addressed the form and representational paradigms of
photography.
235
If modern painting’s challenge was to reduce its subject matter to its logical gestalt ends, modern photography’s
was to select from its subject. Selection has been a key organizing logic through which photographers and curators
have sought to distinguish the “art” of photography from the art of painting or other fine art forms. Clement
Greenberg, “The Camera’s Glass Eye: Review of an Exhibition of Edward Weston,” The Nation, 9 March 1946.
110
discovering the details it would inevitably find in nature or the weathered surface of a real
house.”
236
The passage criticized the “weathered surfaces” of “real” houses that might seduce a
photographer to err and fetishize the abstraction of its details, what Neutra called the “stunning
cracks in buckly plaster.” By contrast, the simulacrum of the “smooth” surfaces of the studio set
when photographed forced the photographer to show the scene as it was.
237
Through representing
an illusionistic architecture, Weston could find coherence in his photography, according to
Greenberg. Extending this logic, photography might have been at its best when it edged towards
the standards of commercial architectural photography, with its fidelity to its subject matter.
238
Indeed, Weston’s cover for Arts & Architecture suggests a new way of considering
photography’s relationship to architecture by honoring the pile of junk on the Hollywood MGM
lot with a composition reminiscent of commercial architectural photography. Another
photograph of Weston’s was featured on the September 1941 issue and reinforced this approach
(fig. 2.13). This photograph, from 1935, is taken at a low angle and shows Weston’s son Neil at
the top of a large boat frame. We see the expanse of the boat’s unfinished body mid-construction,
Neil an heroic figure at the top of the towering structure. Like the MGM photograph, this
photograph does not show a “stunning detail” but instead represents the complete structure,
thematizing the process of architectural building so commonly discussed in Arts & Architecture.
If these subjects could be shown in the same manner as could a modernist home by Neutra, what
236
Ibid.
237
Clement Greenberg, “The Camera’s Glass Eye: Review of an Exhibition of Edward Weston,” The Nation 9
March 1946.
238
This logic aligned with Greenberg’s gatekeeping, which asserted modernist painting and sculpture’s unique
purchase on abstraction and photography’s subordinate role as a recording device, but in so doing further
highlighted the tension inherent in the project of architectural photography that Neutra approached in his comments
on Shulman versus Weston. If architectural photography was an applied art, it could not concern itself with
aestheticizing details in a building. But within Arts & Architecture, the contexts into which architectural
photography was placed questioned these boundaries.
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was the difference between commercial architectural photography and the so-called art
photography practiced by figures such as Weston? While not an architectural photographer,
Weston’s photograph nonetheless provokes fundamental questions about commercial
architectural photography’s identity.
The cover photograph reveals a broader theme across Arts & Architecture: it offered
architectural photographers a wide range of subjects, without compromising their formal
approach to these subjects. In the same way that Weston focused on a site key to the fantastic
representations of Los Angeles—the MGM studio lot—so too did Arts & Architecture push the
genre in new directions and into new relationships with its subject through assignments with a
particular significance to Los Angeles By troubling the genre’s relationship to its subject, the
magazine also catalyzed a period of experimentation for commercial architectural photography
in which photographers could not only take on new subjects, but could test new ways of
expressing support or critique of its subject.
Representing Los Angeles
In these early years, Arts & Architecture presented many different architectural projects
and events in Los Angeles. Reprints of speeches by Vice President Henry Wallace, a column
called “Double Talk” by the locally notable leftist writer Jake Zeitlin, and frequent informative,
encouraging texts on planning by a variety of writers and architects invoked traces of cultural
front discourse established in the 1930s. Private homes and commercial buildings were
nonetheless shown through conventional architectural photography, but editors managed their
appearance by presenting them in the same way as they did photography of the public housing
projects. While photographs may not have equalized the two discrete forms of architecture in
readers’ minds, they did convey a visual affinity between the two.
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John Entenza was a member of the planning group Telesis, which involved a diverse
range of professionals interested in citizen-centered planning initiatives. Entenza featured
reviews and highlights of these projects during the wartime years. He also highlighted projects
by both the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA) and other housing
authorities across the country in issues in 1941 and 1942, showcasing new public housing
projects and war housing built by modernist architects such as Neutra. The May 1943 issue
included a supplement on all the HACLA public housing projects built to date, photographed by
Shulman. Like the pamphlets and books addressed in Chapter One, the spreads in this issue
foregrounded the contrasts between blighted living conditions and the improved, modernist
living cultivated through public housing. The photographs in the spread, moreover, show the
transformation from cluttered, dilapidated houses to the empty, orderly geometric designs of the
new public housing sites (figs. 2.14 & 2.15).
In one of the only articles over the course of its run to include portraiture, Arts &
Architecture later included an article in the August 1946 by photographer and journalist Louis
Clyde Stoumen, who would go on to be a Los Angeles-based member of the New York Photo
League. The article featured a dance group of Black and Chicano teenagers called the Pan-
American Dance Group. Stoumen covered a performance they gave at Aliso Village, one of the
public housing complexes, and included a four by three grid of photographic portraits of the
teenagers (fig. 2.15). The feature suggested the magazine’s persistent interest in the 1940s on
highlighting the ongoing importance of public housing not just architecturally but also culturally.
Yet more importantly, Arts & Architecture’s foregrounding of HACLA initiatives,
especially during the wartime years, made an argument for Los Angeles’s prominence to a
national audience interested in planning and the future of the United States postwar. In the
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editorial for the issue, Entenza wrote that “before 1942, public housing in the city of Los Angeles
was fighting a peacetime enemy—slum—but in that year it went to war along with the rest of
America.”
239
Entenza continues to highlight national efforts towards building subsidized housing
for war workers, arguing that Los Angeles public housing became a “leading part” of the home
front. Through this feature, Arts & Architecture joined the ranks of most architecture magazines
in this period focusing on the war efforts. It made the case that Los Angeles was not an exception
to other U.S. cities, but an important pioneering model for them in terms of architecture and
planning.
Such conceptions of region underpinned Arts & Architecture’s treatment of Los Angeles
during these years. As early as 1942, in fact, writer Carey McWilliams authored an article in the
magazine on defense housing for the military in the region in which he claimed that “no other
metropolitan area in the United States offers such possibilities for successful planning as Los
Angeles County,” highlighting its “relative newness” as one of many benefits.
240
McWilliams’
influential Southern California: An Island on Land (1946) helped to define Los Angeles as a
place with a history, thus amplifying a portion of the city’s identity that had not been carefully
enunciated previously. “For this land is not merely a testing ground,” McWilliams wrote, “it is
also a forcing ground, a place where ideas, practices, and customs must prove their worth or be
discarded.”
241
McWilliams’ conceptual framework for understanding Southern California
remained remarkably resonant even as the region underwent radical infrastructural, architectural,
and demographic changes. In 1949, critic Frederick S. Wight similarly argued that Richard
239
Arts & Architecture Magazine 60, no. 4 (May 1943): 19.
240
Carey McWilliams, “Labor Plans for Defense Housing,” Arts & Architecture 59, no.3 (March 1942): 22.
241
Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on Land. (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1946),
370.
114
Neutra saw Los Angeles as a “proving ground for modern architecture.”
242
As critic E.Boyd
declared late in the 1940s, “the barriers of regionalism are down and our artists are swimming in
the mainstream.”
243
McWilliams’ argument articulated the way Los Angeles evaded
straightforward definition. Through its use of architectural photography, Arts & Architecture
upheld the notion that Southern California acted as a tabula rasa for experiments in architecture
and planning. McWilliams, however, acknowledged that Los Angeles was both a “testing” and a
“forcing” ground. The magazine, I suggest, extended this concept of the city. Rather than assert a
distinctive style or aesthetic of the city, Arts & Architecture used photographs to present Los
Angeles architecture and design as a site for testing new designs, arts, and architectures but also
a battleground, where experiments had high stakes.
The deferral of LA-specific representations gave the magazine an aura of the
cosmopolitan internationalism Entenza and the magazine cultivated. The placelessness of
architectural photography could smoothly change continents and easily reorient readers through
its familiar way of showing buildings.
244
In 1950, John Entenza turned over his editor’s notes to
reprinting statements by the UN and articles from the UNESCO courier. The magazine began to
reflect this overt commitment to liberalism and international community building through its
coverage of architectural projects.
245
Coverage during wartime years was limited to discourses
242
Frederick S. Wight, “Richard Neutra – a Philosophy of Design,” Arts & Architecture 76, no. 1 (January 1959):
29.
243
Arts & Architecture Magazine 65, no. 7 (July 1948): 14. In its arts coverage, the magazine repeatedly featured
several Los Angeles-based artists, including Rico Lebrun, Bernard Rosenthal, and Hilaire Hiller. While it did not
disavow their connection to Los Angeles, it certainly did not attribute significance to their work based on their locale
and often argued for their significance on a national, and increasingly globalized, scale.
244
Vanessa Schwartz has argued that news magazines during the height of the jet age used photography precisely
for its ability to exist impermanently: the worlds it visualized in the popular press would be replaced by new worlds
in the next issue, providing to readers a steady, dematerialized stream of exposure to new places. Schwartz, Jet Age
Aesthetics: The Glamour of Media in Motion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 103.
245
Since the mid-1930s, with the involvement and showcasing of such architects as Rudolph Schindler and Richard
Neutra, European émigré associates living around Los Angeles influenced the content and style of the magazine.
Much of the magazine’s graphic design throughout the 1940s reflected the presence of Herbert Matter on the
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about European life on the war front, with articles on topics like American films screened in
army camps. Occasional articles in the late 1940s invoked democracy spreading efforts in Latin
America, but it was not a regular topic. In the 1950s, by contrast, the magazine included one
international project per issue, often by architects unfamiliar in the United States. After joining
the magazine’s editorial advisory board in 1951, Esther McCoy traveled to Mexico several times
to write lengthy features on various modern architects and their projects, which were featured on
two covers in 1951 and 1952.
246
The increased presence of Isamu Noguchi’s sculpture opened
the magazine frequently to the aesthetics and practices of sculpture and design in Japan, and the
magazine frequently referenced Scandinavian design and other European influences. The
magazine’s penultimate issue included a project from Tunisia.
247
Even when Arts & Architecture directly engaged with Los Angeles on a broader scale,
accompanying text did not completely support such attempts. The May 1949 feature on the
Wurdeman & Becket Prudential Building used dramatic night photographs of the building set
against the city as a backdrop to help characterize the building as a “symbol of the city and the
western way of life,” seen in the extensive photographic coverage at day and night (fig. 2.16). In
the same issue, arts critic E.Boyd, however, criticized another recently completed Wurdeman &
Becket project, the Petroleum building, remarking that its “crushing proportions” would disorient
editorial advisory board. Matter’s covers for the magazine, as well as covers by Alvin Lustig and others, reflected
formal principles inherited or directly learned from Bauhaus teachings. For more on Lustig and his influences, see
Steven Heller and Elaine Lustig Cohen. Born Modern: The Life and Design of Alvin Lustig (San Francisco:
Chronicle Books, 2010).
246
Esther McCoy wrote profiles of significant modern architects in Mexico in the August 1951 issue and returned
with a long feature on the El Pedregal development outside of Mexico City in August 1952. McCoy, “Architecture
in Mexico,” Arts & Architecture Magazine 68, no. 1 (August 1951): 27-30; McCoy, “The New University City
Mexico,” Arts & Architecture Magazine 69, no. 8 (August 1952): 22-37.
247
“Subterranean Village by Myron Goldfinger,” Arts & Architecture Magazine 84, no. 6 (June 1967): 24-26.
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and disturb pedestrians and dwarf the rest of the cityscape.
248
His comments contextualized the
ongoing battle over large architectural projects and their appropriateness for the city.
A Glamorous Reputation
In 1948, McCoy, a close friend of Entenza’s, wrote a satirical short story for the New
Yorker. First published in 1948, “The Important House” tells the story of a Mr. and Mrs.
Blakeley who live in a recently completed modern home, presumably in Los Angeles, by an
acclaimed fictitious architect named Mr. Aiden. The architect brings a photographer to shoot the
house, an event highly anticipated by Mrs. Blakeley who is lured with the promise of her
“important” house being featured in a competition sponsored by a fictitious shelter magazine
called House and Garden. An increasingly absurd performance unfolds through the act of
staging a house for architectural photographs. Over the course of the afternoon, Mrs. Blakeley
becomes progressively demoralized as the architect and photographer take over the house,
ridding it of any personal touches and furniture once cherished by the owners. She begins
questioning her own taste, and her ownership over the house, as the photographer transforms the
house into a comical assortment of plantings stolen from the neighbor’s property, magazines
taped to tables, and old outdoor furniture hauled into the house.
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We are dragged, alongside Irene Blakeley, through the ordeal involved in a photography
shoot, seeing another side to the innocuous objects in finished prints—McCoy intended to reveal
more than the photograph ever would. Not only did she demystify the visual apparatuses that
sold the idea of a house to the lay public, she insisted that these images’ rhetorics are produced
248
E. Boyd, “Art,” Arts & Architecture Magazine 76 no.5 (May 1959): 14.
249
Among other scenes, she parodies the oft-told tale of architectural photographers like Julius Shulman having
assistants hold branches of plants above the camera so as to frame new houses without landscaping. Esther McCoy,
“The Important House,” The New Yorker (April 17, 1958): 50-56.
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through a triangulation of new professionals in the postwar world. Whereas Irene Blakeley’s
husband, Phil, is an unremarkable presence in the published story, in an unpublished draft
McCoy developed his character more fully. Phil is an executive at “Llewellyn Aircraft,” a
position which, in the draft, prompts him repeatedly to identify with the problem solving
exhibited by both architect and photographer. His faith in the profession, then, lends him blind
faith in the photographs produced, a faith that Irene, as a discerning outside observer, lacks. In
the unpublished draft, McCoy strengthens her critique of the photographer. As Irene becomes
overwhelmed by the men’s takeover of her house, she asks why the photograph should not
capture the house as it is in real life. Condescendingly, the architect responds, “I’m sorry I’m not
able to explain to you the function of a photograph.”
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The draft, then, further cultivated the
paradox between the unrelenting confidence in the production of a photograph and the
inscrutability of the final product. McCoy implies the long-evoked fear regarding photographic
representation in general: to know the photograph is not to know the house.
Supported by the husband Phil’s understanding, there is confidence in the ability of the
architect and photographer to craft the perfect image of the house. Conversely, McCoy stages a
complete breakdown in communication of the image, particularly to a female audience. The
omission of the aforementioned lines and character development in the published piece lessened
the scorching critique of the modern architecture public relations complex and the veneer of
progress associated with the postwar design and architecture cultures. The published essay also
erased the photographer’s complicity in the disfunction of midcentury design publicity.
250
This line is from a draft of the story but was cut from the published version. “The Important House,” 1948, box
10, folder 15, Esther McCoy Papers, circa 1876-1990, bulk 1938-1989, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution.
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McCoy’s article draft narrativized an important split that played out in Arts &
Architecture. The fictional magazine in “The Important House” was most likely pointed towards
more mainstream shelter magazines; Arts & Architecture’s inclusion of avant-garde art, music,
and culture pieces positioned the magazine as an outlier. But it was also an outlier because of the
way its spreads probed the way architectural photography conveyed the importance of the
architecture featured. Historian Alice Friedman has proposed that the shared quality in
midcentury modern architecture existed on affective and perceptual registers: the buildings
collectively produced a “distinctive American glamour.”
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Friedman defines glamour as both
experiential and ideological and, most importantly, considers it a language distinctly rooted in
ways of seeing buildings through visual media. She first frames her definition of glamour
through Shulman’s photographs of Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House no. 22, thus placing Arts
& Architecture as an important producer of such glamour. Yet glamour was also a concern for
those architectural photographers who felt the term used against them. Shulman conceded in his
book that “A complaint occasionally heard about architectural photography is that it glamorizes
the building; this need not be true…”
252
Throughout its issues, Arts & Architecture experimented with its photographic coverage
in ways that reveal ambivalence towards the idea of a homogeneous glamourous style emerging
through of its issues. In the previously mentioned May 1949 issue featuring the Prudential
Building, several photographic approaches are evident. In a less common choice, the building
under construction was featured as the source material for the graphic design featured on the
cover (fig. 2.17). Designed by Charles Kratka and a collaborator identified as G.S., the cover
251
Alice Friedman, American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2010).
252
Julius Shulman, Photographing Architecture and Interiors (New York: Whitney Publications, 1962), 47.
119
design is comprised of a six by fix grid, each square a component of a photograph of the
Prudential Building. The squares vary in tone, some blue and others black and white, creating a
dynamic composition that breaks the photographs into its constituent parts while maintaining its
overall pictorial structure. The spread itself also plays with the photographs and how they convey
the building project. The opening page consists of three small photographs taken by Jay Connor
and Tom Riggs. All three depict the strong geometry of the building, how its central vertical axis
meets the sweeping horizontal wings. In lieu of detailed study, these photographs prioritize an
abstracting view, one that highlights the spatiality of the building against the day and night sky.
The facing page, page 43, features a full-page photograph of the building at night (fig. 2.18). It
was photographed at an oblique angle, only part of its form visible, but the photographer instead
prioritized the dramatic effect of the building on the street, a tall queen palm tree creating an
ethereal shadow on its broad planar expanse. The glowing lights from the building, combined
with the shining street and subtle tonal gradations on its façade evoke the monumentality and
glamour of which Friedman and others have written.
The rest of the spread, however, departs from this paradigm. The next page includes two
thumbnail photographs that show very little of the building but instead act as studies of its
surfaces, light, and textures (fig. 2.19). They float at the top of the page, accompanying four
other photographs, one of which is an aerial photograph at night. It shows the Prudential
Building in the distance, as if floating amidst the rest of the city, its striking form making its
presence felt. The photograph itself is blurry, the building appearing at an odd angle, but its
technical imperfections are outweighed by the photograph’s ability to demonstrate the building’s
importance on the city’s skyline. We might think of the rest of these photographs as subsidiary to
the full-page glamour shot on page 43. My point, however, is that multiple approaches to
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photographing a building comprised each spread in Arts & Architecture, and the idea of the
glamorous was supported by photographs that would not, if isolated, be considered as such.
In its coverage of Case Study Houses, Arts & Architecture’s use of photographs provoked
questions about how the magazine was codifying ways of viewing the architecture pictured. The
December 1950 issue featuring Raphael Soriano’s Case Study house (called Case Study House
1950), opened with a page whose bottom half was comprised of a conventional architectural
photograph of the house in the evening from a low angle (fig. 2.20). The photograph highlighted
its open patio and well-placed landscaping and the textures of its class wall and ridged ceiling.
The top half of the page, by contrast, shows four small photographs all cropped to different
dimensions and placed at different heights on the page. Each displays a small snippet of a room:
part of the kitchen visible, a door, the courtyard, a bathroom, but they are cropped so tightly as to
make reading the scenes difficult. The photographs seem to prioritize not a view of the house
but, instead, artistic expression facilitated by the house. On the following page, taken up mostly
by two straightforward views of the living room, there is another odd photographic detail. On the
far right is a small photograph, the scene ensconced in darkness. Abstract shadows and vaguely
vegetal shapes emerge, yet it is impossible to tell what the content is, and the rest of the article
offers no clues.
What other pages offer, however, is further experimentation. An additional page includes
an abstract thumbnail photograph, this one all dark, showing what looks like a ridged metal
surface, possibly the house’s roof. This spread revealed that the magazine’s agenda for
photography was far from straightforward. If glamour was one of its purviews, a subtle
experimentation with photography was just as, if not more, important in its spreads. Individual
photographs were included that experimented with their subject matter, not always to display a
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cohesive sense of glamour or modernism. Indeed, even in when it came to Richard Neutra’s
acclaimed Palm Springs Kaufmann House, its coverage was decidedly more understated than its
coverage in the Los Angeles Times Home Magazine and Life Magazine. Glamour, as both Simon
Niedenthal and Alice Friedman have studied, was a foundational marketing tool for the
Kaufmann House: the Life spread, titled “Glamourized Houses: Photographer Julius Shulman is
a master at making them look dramatic,” opened with a two-page photograph of the house
looking magnificent in the twilight, a woman stretched out by the pool (fig. 2.21).
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The house,
and Shulman’s photograph, also made the cover of the Home magazine, and it showed the house
standing boldly against the desert hills, a beacon of strong geometry against the natural
landscape (fig. 2.22). Arts & Architecture, by contrast, did not give it a cover nor did it devote
much pomp and circumstance to the house, deemphasizing the house’s position amidst the
dramatic landscape, one of the primary ways Shulman’s photographs conveyed a sense of
glamour. Moreover, it never highlighted an architectural photographer’s work the way that Life
did. While the house’s coverage in the July 1949 issue was flattering and substantial, its
coverage was similar to any other house or building featured in the magazine (fig. 2.8).
Photography’s Stabilizing Presence
The subtle experimentations with photography and layout enlisted in Arts & Architecture
were barely discussed in articles. Indeed, architectural photography was mentioned only a
handful of times, other than to point to what a photograph illustrated in terms of furniture, design
details, etcetera. Architectural photography confronted a conceptual challenge in the magazine: it
was included as an understated illustration but restricted from participation in the more
253
Friedman, American Glamour; Simon Niedenthal, “Glamourized Houses”: Neutra, Photography, and the
Kaufmann House.” Journal of Architectural Education 47, no. 2 (1993): 101-112.
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experimental articles on vision, perception, and images. Even as the magazine remained intent on
denying architectural photography as a creative form of photography, however, certain
photographic placements revealed that the architectural photograph was in fact a more contested
ground of visual meaning making than the architecture sections, or the arts sections, of the
magazine might suggest.
As Arts & Architecture covered debates that revolved around the complexities of human
vision, multimedia art, the dynamism of new architectural forms, and the mutability of
perception, architectural photography provided a stability of representation and recognizable
iconography that maintained a unified visual agenda for the magazine even as it showcased
experimental ideas.
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Architectural photography’s formal and ideological stability and
consistency created the conditions under which magazine editors depended upon it and,
paradoxically, under which editors, writers, and readers overlooked it, thinking of it as mere
illustration. Whether taken in 1940 or 1967, a building or other project would be represented
similarly in an architectural photograph. This is not to say that new camera equipment and
technology did not affect photographers’ practices—they did.
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It is rather to argue that looking
for change over time in architectural photography during this period, whether caused by
technology or otherwise, discounts the significance of what remained continuous.
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Several technological improvements changed photography’s identity during the years of Arts & Architecture ‘s
run, including the improvement of hand-held cameras for capturing speed and for increased accessibility for the
amateur photographer. The improvement and increased affordability of color transparencies meant a proliferation of
color photography in many publications. This did not occur in Arts & Architecture because it remained too
expensive to include color photographs. Former editor David Travers remarked that he loved when their advertisers
paid for color ads, not because of the amount of money brought in but because it gave to the magazine color
photography. For more on camera technology, see Claire Zimmerman, Photographic Architecture in the Twentieth
Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
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Claire Zimmerman has shown that advances in camera technology after World War II, arising simultaneously
across nations, including the advent of front swinging lenses and the interchangeability of the lens, gave
photographers the ability to control more factors on site, such as adjusting focal length, and to produce sharper
photos from oblique angles, avoiding focal distortion. Zimmerman, Photographic Architecture, 220.
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Arts & Architecture attempted to assert the sophistication of the visual arts it showcased
and the arts criticism it produced about a national scene. With locally renowned art critic Merle
Armitage serving on the Editorial Advisory Board in the 1930s, California Arts & Architecture
highlighted the achievements of many local modernists, water colorists, and sculptors. By the
1940s, it was covering a wide range of national painters and sculptors. In February 1944, the
magazine featured “Jackson Pollock: A Questionnaire,” a brief exchange between the artist and
an unidentified interviewer. Arts & Architecture was committed over the decades to a holistic,
reflexive, and educational presentation of vanguard artistic practices, addressing skepticism
towards abstraction, beginning conversations about the problems of art criticism, and
foregrounding experimentations in art therapy.
By the early 1940s, the magazine’s primary critic was Grace Clements, an LA-based
writer and painter. Clements’ early columns focused on exhibits around Los Angeles and until
around 1946, the Art section usually included two columns, one for developments in LA and one
for San Francisco. When critic Dore Ashton took over the arts column in the mid-1950s, she
increasingly began covering exhibitions and galleries in New York. Even as the Art column kept
pace with post-abstract expressionist art practices that further radicalized form and experimented
across media, under Ashton’s direction it took a more restrained position towards the expanded
field of art making than was indicated by the magazine’s non-art columns that, over the decades,
celebrated and circulated a range of multimedia, architectonic, and visual experiments. With
Peter Yates in charge of the Music column as he had been for three decades, Arts & Architecture
nonetheless demonstrated extensive coverage of a variety of experimental art practices, many
based in LA, by the late 1950s.
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Arts & Architecture infrequently included writing on photography exhibitions or on
photographs, an omission that reflected the status of photography at the time in the United States,
where most prominent curators, scholars, and art institutions considered it a less important fine
art form as compared to painting and sculpture. When they did mention photography, the
magazine’s columnists varied in their opinions. In July 1953, critic James Fitzsimmons reviewed
a photography show at the New York Museum of Modern Art, celebrating the promise of more
photographers capable of producing art via photography. He acknowledged the influence of
painting on photography and vice versa, and defended photography as a “medium of
expression,” reminding readers who would claim that the camera “only sees what is in front of
it,” that “in art it is the ‘how’ and not the ‘what’ that matters.”
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In the January 1959 issue that
celebrated the new UNESCO headquarters, the uncredited Notes in Passing argued that the
camera had freed abstract art from its service to reality. It likened the camera and the new
UNESCO building as similarly indicative of an era of triumphant liberal humanism: “In bygone
days, to immortalize Henry VIII’s features, Holbein was called to do the job, but to record the
inauguration of the new Unesco headquarters, a Leica and a roll of film are sufficient.”
257
Every few months, Arts & Architecture featured a single or double page spread of art
photographs (what the magazine often referred to as creative photography) that manipulated and
experimented with form and abstraction, including those by Ralph Samuels, Aaron Siskind, Max
Yavno, Peter Stackpole, Brett Weston, Earl Scott, and Edward Weston. The style of art
photography most featured by the magazine was either so-called “straight” photography or
abstractions, in which photographers experimented with light, motion, and technology in the
256
James Fitzsimmons, “Art,” Arts & Architecture 70, no. 7 (July 1953): 6. The show in question was Edward
Steichen’s “Post-War European Photography” exhibition.
257
John Entenza, “Notes in Passing,” Arts & Architecture 76, no. 1 (January 1959): 9.
125
tradition of European artists working at the Bauhaus, for instance. Arts & Architecture
outsourced much of its philosophy of vision and image making over the years to its features by
and about Hungarian theorist and artist György Kepes, sometimes in the form of reprinted
speeches Kepes gave or in coverage of his exhibitions (fig. 2.23). Kepes’s perspective lent to the
magazine a complex stance about vision and photography that was equivocal and capacious.
258
Through Kepes, Arts & Architecture demonstrated that experimental photography, made under
the guise of scientific experimentation, could best reveal unseen frontiers and landscapes.
Kepes also established for Arts & Architecture the relationship between urbanism,
planning, vision, and representation, arguing for the paramount importance of studying how
people understood the visual appearances of cities. Presaging later experiments with what the
“image” of a city might be, Kepes wrote in May 1947 of the lack of visual integrity in the urban
landscape, mass media, and architecture, suggesting that built environments should “generate a
new imagery.”
259
Following the rhetoric of previous generations of urban scholars, he proposed
that the contemporary world was formless and disintegrated and suggested visual solutions for
overhauling this problem.
260
Such articles pitted the advance of science and technology against
the reparative realm of art in order to argue that visual arts could amend the “chaos” wrought by
technology. Kepes’s focus on the term image furthered Arts & Architecture’s focus on vision and
images as terms and modes of inquiry over photography specifically.
261
258
For more on Kepes’s career and theories of vision, see John Blakinger, György Kepes: Undreaming the Bauhaus.
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2019).
259
Kepes would go on to collaborate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with urbanist Kevin Lynch on
Lynch’s 1956 project Perceptual Form of the City, which formed the basis of inquiry for Lynch’s later book The
Image of the City (1960).
260
György Kepes, “Form and Motion,” Arts & Architecture Magazine 65, no. 7 (July 1948): 26.
261
Kepes wrote most frequently of “images,” rather than of photography, which deprioritized the latter in the
language and terms used in the magazine.
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Although the least discussed visual medium in the magazine, architectural photography
was a key device that supported the presentation of discourse on visuality and fine arts within
Arts & Architecture. As manifest on the pages of the magazine, significant spreads about
painting and sculpture were physically surrounded on preceding and later pages by architectural
photographs. Occasionally architectural photographers took the photographs of art objects in the
magazine, as when Shulman photographed Henry Moore’s sculptures, the most explicit spread in
which architectural photography was discussed and praised.
262
While scholars such as art
historian John Curley have argued that a photographic unconscious undergirded American art
discourses and practices during the Cold War, photographs were also materially present and
circulating alongside articles on art, painting, sculpture, and abstraction.
263
To consider
photography only a latent influence on vanguard art practices developing by the late 1940s
misinterprets the extent to which, in magazines such as Arts & Architecture, photography was
folded into criticism about painting and expanded fields of art making, but also into discourses
about the very idea of the power and purposes of illustrative imagery.
Outside of its architectural coverage and Case Study House program, Arts & Architecture
is best remembered in scholarship for its innovative covers reflecting a network of creators and
their experimentation with graphic design and typology.
264
Over the decades photographic covers
occasionally related directly to content inside the magazine, which forged an important visual
connection that informed how the magazine related issue content to the medium of photography.
262
“Julius Shulman’s gifts for architectural observation contributed to his being particularly astute in re-creating
Moore’s art since both men are practiced at seeing configurations among intervals of volume.” Rosalind G.
Wholden, “Henry Moore: Deukalion of Modern Sculptors,” Arts & Architecture Magazine 82, no. 1(January 1965):
23.
263
John Curley, A Conspiracy of Images: Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and the Art of the Cold War (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2013).
264
These include John Follis, Ray Eames, Alvin Lustig, Herbert Matter, Charles Kratka, and many more.
127
Often these covers featured parts of or the entirety of an architectural photograph. When
photographer Max Yavno’s photograph of a cracked, peeling building façade was featured as the
cover in September 1951 (fig. 2.24), Arts & Architecture had not yet featured an image showing
a building disconnected from its commercial or architectural significance anywhere in the
publication. In its flattening of the wall and highlighting of the jumbled yet lasting painted marks
on its surface, including a Latin American-esque codex, Yavno’s photograph, while unorthodox
for a cover, nonetheless fell in line with the sort of creative photography the magazine
occasionally included and also matched the visual dynamism of its graphic covers.
265
Later in
Yavno’s issue was a large advertising supplement on Steelbilt Sliding glass doors, with extensive
photographic coverage of the manufacture, assembly, transportation, and installation of the
product (fig. 2.25). Yavno, who had served as president of the Photo League in the late 1930s
and had photographed the urban landscapes of San Francisco and Los Angeles in the 1940s, had
largely abandoned art and social documentary photography by the late 1940s. As such, we might
be less surprised to discover that he was the photographer for all the manufacture and process
shots.
266
The Yavno cover highlighted the strange disconnect cultivated when an Arts &
Architecture cover was photographic. It called attention to the networks of meaning produced by
photography in magazines and the discrepancies between those meanings based on whether they
were documenting architecture, advertising products, or part of an art feature.
By the 1960s, Entenza was losing an estimated $1000 a month on the magazine and
chose to sell to David Travers in 1962. The magazine covers increasingly showed cropped or
265
Later in the decade, for instance, Brassai would be featured and celebrated for his graffiti photographs. Clive
Scott, Street Photography from Atget to Cartier-Bresson (New York and London: Routledge, 2020 [2007]).
266
One of the photos of the door installed was credited to Shulman. For more on the history of commercial
photography and corporations, see Elspeth Brown, The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of
American Commercial Culture, 1884-1929 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
128
other views of the architecture featured in the issue (fig. 2.26).
267
These covers disguised the
architecture, presenting portions of structures without context, making it difficult to orient the
eye or even discern whether the structure was, in fact, part of a larger building. The editorial staff
used commercial architectural photography as raw material out of which it could craft images
that diverged from their illustrative category. Insofar as the photographic covers reduced the
architectural photograph to its most abstracted details, disconnected from the larger project, they
signaled a desire to maintain the experimentation in form evinced by years of graphic covers
without having to commission a graphic designer for an original cover—these photographic
covers could most likely be done in house. The selection and manipulation of these images for
covers made architectural photographs useful in a different way: they could be used to create
abstraction out of “mere” illustration. Because, as I suggest, architectural photography was the
visual language of Arts & Architecture, its editors could transform the architectural photographs
used inside the magazine to convey information about buildings into universalizing abstract
photographic statements. The photographic covers, in other words, borrowed the content of
architectural spreads and turned readers' attention to the medium of photography. It was the site,
moreover, where the question became most apparent: how did commercial architectural
photography relate to other experimentations with art and photography? It required an editorial
transformation into a cover to have the same influence as the abstractions of a figure like György
Kepes.
These cover manipulations were not isolated incidents. They register, rather, an
unresolved dilemma at the heart of photography’s status in the period. Architectural
267
This in fact marked a return to the approach towards cover design in the late 1930s and early 1940s, which often
included full architectural shots on the cover. Shulman’s first cover for the magazine was in January 1940.
Occasionally cropped portions of architectural photographs appeared on covers in the 1950s, but not with the
frequency they did in the 1960s.
129
photography’s role Arts & Architecture revolved around editors’ inability to see that it could
accomplish two purposes, as Shulman argued: to create photographs that conveyed information
about a building’s design and appearance and to create abstract compositions that provoked
meditation on vision and form. While the photographic covers explored architectural
photography’s ability to accomplish the latter, they were never supported by accompanying
articles or spreads that could highlight architectural photography as the conduit to larger
questions.
House in Industry
A final example related to the magazine’s coverage of the arts illustrates the precarity of
the subject matter in photography when the stakes of Los Angeles, race, and architecture
converged. The November 1947 issue included a ten-page feature on a prefabricated “General
Panel” system, built by the eponymous corporation, invented and developed by architects
Konrad Wachsmann and Walter Gropius.
268
Titled “House in ‘Industry,’” the article advertised
the architects’ new system for industrial prefabrication, promoted as the most important
innovation in building in the past century. After World War II, corporations eager to produce
new systems of prefabrication scrambled to answer heightened demands for housing across the
country, and found the space to establish factories in Los Angeles, often out of wartime
268
General Panel, New York, had been founded with financial support from an investing firm six years earlier out
of Wachsmann and Gropius’s proposals for their prefabricated house called the Packaged House. By 1946,
Wachsmann spearheaded efforts to move the corporation west, then called General Panel California. There, the
federal War Assets Administration allocated the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation’s engine factory in Burbank to
General Panel. By July of 1947, after many delays and false starts, the plant was equipped to produce 10,000 houses
a year. When Wachsmann and Gropius began experimenting with prefabrication back in New York, they
commissioned extensive photographic documentation of each component and process involved in the first model
form. This priority remained when the corporation moved to California and is reflected in the ample set of images
included in the Arts & Architecture article. Gilbert Herbert, Dream of the Factory-Made House: Walter Gropius and
Konrad Wachsmann (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984).
130
facilities.
269
The robust postwar industrialization of the city was one of the driving factors further
establishing it economically on new national and international fronts.
The article opened with a verso page of textual introduction facing a full-page
photograph showing the exterior of one of the model houses from the system, shining bright in
direct sunlight (fig. 2.27). The next six pages were devoted to photographs of the General Panels
plant, materials used, and various stages of assembly-line construction (fig. 2.28). The magazine
had included features over the past several years about prefabrication but “House in ‘Industry’”
was the first to include extensive documentation of the labor and architectures involved in the
process. By doing so, its editors experimented with a new approach towards representing the idea
of prefabrication.
The dynamism of the photographs of manufacturing and material gave way to a final,
full-page interior photograph of the staged model home (fig. 2.29). Its mise-en-scène bore
compositional resemblance to architectural photographs featured in nearly every issue of Arts &
Architecture: an interior shot, the photograph emphasized the relationship between the indoors,
the large glass windows, a painting and plant, and the outdoors.
270
Yet this shot remained an odd
note on which to end for several reasons. The interior dominates to the point of distraction—the
269
President Harry Truman appointed Wilson W. Wyatt as head of the newly-created office of Housing Expediter,
which in February 1946 produced the Veteran’s Emergency Housing Program. The program allowed for the
expansion of factory-made house building by allocating leftover war plants and materials and by guaranteeing a
market for the houses. The Veteran’s Emergency Housing Program was abruptly terminated by Truman in January
1947, another capricious chapter for prefabricated building and its funding immediately postwar. Herbert, Dream of
the Factory-Made House, 279.
270
While previous shots in the spread were credited to the Dick Whittington studio, LA’s largest and oldest
commercial photography studio, and to Anna Wachsmann, the ultimate photograph does not include a credit line. In
Architectural Forum’s coverage of the house, several photographs inside the staged model home in Burbank are
credited to Ezra Stoller, but it is unclear whether Stoller likewise took the interior shots included in Arts &
Architecture.
131
sliver of the outdoors seems on the brink of being pushed out of the frame.
271
The photograph
also prominently displayed a print of Diego Rivera’s painting The Flower Carriers, made in
1935, mounted on what appears to be a piece of plywood.
272
It was rare enough for Arts &
Architecture to include photographs of staged interiors with legible works of art in them—
usually when paintings were staged in photographs, they were abstract and were placed in the
background, making it nearly impossible to read any details or identify a maker. This ultimate
photograph, moreover, was the first time in the magazine’s history that a figural, no less
recognizable, work of art was included in a photograph of a house interior.
273
The Flower Carriers is a small easel painting that was commissioned for the San
Francisco Museum of Art collection and painted around the same time that Rivera had been
commissioned to paint several large murals in the United States. Throughout the 1940s and early
50s, the painting travelled internationally as part of several exhibitions. It depicts a Mexican
laborer bent over from the weight of a massive basket of flowers strapped to his back. A woman
comes from behind to hold the bottom of the basket, lessening the burden. Their bodies and the
voluminous flowers take up nearly the entire frame, with ground and plants filling in the rest.
Often the case in Rivera’s works, the painting conflates the painterly corporeal masses with the
symbolic weight of labor. The mutual aid, the distribution of volume and bodies across the
canvas, transform into searing critiques of the violence and weight of the underclass’s laboring.
271
One of the key selling points in this period of California lifestyles was the hybridization of indoor-outdoor
living, and this was often exemplified in photographs that showed the balance or blending of both interiors and
exteriors in houses.
272
Gropius and Rivera knew each other, but the extent of their relationship is unknown, although it is most likely
Gropius would have suggested the print. In Walter Gropius’s house are clay figurines gifted to the architect by
Rivera and Frida Kahlo, allegedly from a trip Gropius made to Mexico City in 1947. This is the primary material
evidence of their relationship. https://www.thewoodhouseny.com/journal/2018/4/26/gropius-house
273
As a counterpoint, several Cliff May ranch houses of the period, photographed by Maynard Parker, did indeed
include figural paintings that often consisted of Latin American iconographies. Cliff May’s houses were never
included in Arts & Architecture.
132
The Flower Carriers had a history with Los Angeles—more precisely, with Hollywood.
Between 1947 and 1951, five different films featured a print of the painting—the first, Bury Me
Dead, was released in October 1947, one month before the Arts & Architecture issue. The five
movies, made by different companies and with different plots, loosely fit into the crime and film
noir genres popular in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a time when the Hollywood Left was
consistently berated and oppressed by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)
and the culture of fear surrounding it. Referring to the painting as a “semiotic calling card for
political voices,” film scholar Frank Krutnik has argued that the painting’s understated yet
significant presence across the five films expands our understanding of leftist responses to
American culture in film because it presented a subversive political message about labor and
collective action otherwise impermissible in the heat of the House UnAmerican Activities
Committee trials and rampant red baiting in the city and country.
274
As a circulating piece of visual culture common enough to appear across multiple films
within a five-year period, The Flower Carrier created conditions through which to reflect on the
various components involved in the act of photographic representation.
275
Rather than a fixed
conclusion of meaning, the painting’s leftist symbolism is a point of departure for understanding
the networks of representation that make this photograph and story significant to Arts &
Architecture. If we accept the premise that in the late 1940s, when it was being widely
274
Frank Krutnik, “‘A Living Part of the Class Struggle’: Diego Rivera’s The Flower Carrier and the Hollywood
Left.” In Frank Krutnik, Steve Neale, et al., eds. ‘Un-American Hollywood’: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univeresity Press, 2007), 51-78.
275
Prefabricated model homes created particularly surreal conditions for architectural photography. The magazine’s
September issue of 1947 featured a project similar to Wachsmann and Gropius’s. Called “House in a Factory,” it
was similarly a collaboration between architects and designers and created a plant housed in the Vultee Aircraft
plant. Julius Shulman took the photographs included with the article and here, prefabricated house and factory meet
one another. If the spaces and conditions of the house’s making were separated from the model house itself in
Wachsmann’s house, here the two co-exist. The home is assembled and staged as if it were on a street, and is lit by
the warehouse lights overhead.
133
circulated, this print associated the representation of labor as a method of political critique, then,
within the General Panel photograph in Arts & Architecture, it had to contend with different
forms of labor on display. Its appearance in the photograph, then, was more than just a tacit
assertion of leftist politics.
276
The print’s disruption of the meaning of an interior architectural
photograph opened up to debate what a print could signify for such a scene. The General Panel
photograph aligns with scholar WJT Mitchell’s epistemology of pictures assumed under the term
“metapictures,”
277
or pictures that gesture towards the capacity for self-analysis in all images.
According to Mitchell this self-referentiality “is directed, not only at the medium, but at the
determining conditions of the work—its institutional setting, its historical positionality, its
address to beholders.”
278
Situated squarely within a main architecture feature, the Rivera painting
in the General Panels photograph functioned as a staging ground that summoned unresolved
debates about the magazine’s mission and how architectural photography contributed. While the
photo spread overall promoted Los Angeles’s new economies developing around housing and
manufacture, putting forth a new identity for the city revolving around visuals of its budding
industrial might, the prominence of non-white, Mexican figures, also suggested a return to the
hybridized Spanish-Mexican influences so prominent in the magazine’s promotion of regional
276
The ideals behind Wachsmann and Gropius’s plan, that of a liberatory totalizing system of design, inherited from
Gropius’s Bauhaus, could be seen to be in line with Rivera’s own subject position, both men attempting to fold
radical forms of art and design into capitalist American culture. Yet to read the print as some kind of left-identifying
code word in fact plays into the idea of a monolithic politic formed against HUAC, which downplays the
heterogeneity of political and visual responses to the conservatism in Los Angeles.
277
Mitchell carefully chooses his words and insists on the term picture rather than the term image. In a footnote to
the introduction in Picture Theory, he distinguishes the two: a picture is a “constructed concrete object or
ensemble,” a “deliberate act of representation.” An image is a more flexible formation, a “virtual phenomenal
appearance.” My use of both terms here reflects Mitchell’s distinction. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal
and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 4, fn2.
278
Mitchell’s theory assumes significance here in part because he distinguishes his interest in “pictures about
pictures” from the entrenched debate at the heart of discourse around American modern art in the second half of the
twentieth century, what he refers to as debates over “art about art.” WJT Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal
and Visual Representation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 82.
134
revival architectures in the 1930s, lending a retrojective sense of place to compensate for the
placelessness of prefabrication and modernism more generally.
The art column by Grace Clements, in the issue that included this photograph, lends
clarity to how this photograph orchestrated a point of reckoning with multiple strands of meaning
in the magazine. Clements’ review of English sculptor Eric Gill, published on the occasion of the
publication of his autobiography, marked a candid departure for the critic, whose columns rarely
dove into specific political conditions. Clements reflected on the relationship between
industrialization, labor, and modern art through the posthumously published book, praising Gill
for having “lived his beliefs,” as both a socialist and a devout Catholic. Clements, via Gill,
argued that the ultimate paradox in the industrial world was the belief in man’s freedom: “as long
as the worker is a cog in a machine…he is doomed to a sub-human existence.”
279
Clements
concluded that “the ‘art world’ is no more free or responsible than the industrial world. When
there is wholeness in work art is in the work.”
280
Referring tacitly to the HUAC trials, she
decried the current situation of “government committees and committees of artists with
government backing and prestige,” who, in upholding oppressive labor hierarchies, sever the
relationship between art and the “common work of men.”
While nearly a decade in the making, the HUAC trials came to a head in October and
November of 1947, just as this issue of Arts & Architecture was being prepared and published,
with the first trial beginning on November 25. Inexplicably mounted on a piece of plywood, The
Flower Carriers is placed on the upper left corner of the photograph in which it appears, leaving
enough space to see clearly the wood grain below, thus not disguising its materiality. Plywood,
279
Grace Clements, “Art,” Arts & Architecture Magazine 64, no. 11 (November 1947): 19.
280
Ibid.
135
the material advertised over the course of the rest of the feature, for its use as the exterior skin
glued to the house’s wooden frame, here becomes support for the print, drawing attention to the
way in which all of the photographs and represented forms of labor in the spread coalesce in this
final page. The spread features a quote from Wachsmann, in which the designer praises how the
prefabricated system saves architects time, because they are “relieved of the task of having to
start all details from scratch.”
281
He reassures readers that “great care and thoroughness can be
applied to even the smallest detail which, when developed in the shop, will give it an aspect of
finality and perfection.” Such an enunciated focus on both time saving and on continued quality
of craftsmanship and detail especially provoke questions when compared with the dynamics of
represented labor in The Flower Carriers. The labor on display in Rivera’s print visually
reinscribes the labor of the prefabrication represented earlier in the spread. But in doing so, The
Flower Carriers also points to the precarity with which the meaning of any given architectural
photograph existed in Arts & Architecture. Ultimately, the photograph gives access to the
multiple modes of labor evoked in the article and in the house itself, but the presence of the
Rivera print puts pressure on the degree to which photographers have control over the meaning
of their subject matter.
These political strata embedded in the final photograph, however, did not change the fact
that architectural photography in Arts & Architecture was structured to erase its own
interpretation of a scene, even a scene as potentially significant to the new building industry of
Los Angeles or the brewing censorship in the city. Any subversion or critique of the politics of
staged interior architectural photographs would be undercut in the magazine by the profusion of
similar shots without such a critique embedded, as evident in the Wachsmann article. The final
281
“‘House’ in Industry,” Arts & Architecture Magazine 64, no. 11 (November 1947): 28.
136
photograph of the Wachsmann article was never an individual statement; architectural
photographs were produced in order to be accompanied by other photographs, plans, artworks,
and texts. While photographic meaning was heavily controlled by most magazine editors, in Arts
& Architecture, certain articles and page layouts revealed that, when architectural photography
was given the freedom of expression, it could disclose the competing agendas, ideologies, and
representations usually kept beneath the surface in magazines.
The Future of Los Angeles
As the decades progressed, Arts & Architecture began shifting its focus in terms of the
types of projects shown and the way it used architecture to represent them. Its positions on urban
redevelopment shifted from optimistic in the late 1940s to critical by the mid 1960s.
Experimental forms in architecture, sculpture, and furniture design proliferated by the early
1960s. The celebration of steel-framed homes gave way to a prioritization of modular structures
by architects such as Buckminster Fuller. By the early 1960s, the magazine noted the rise in
systems theory and cybernetics and their structural manifestations, highlighting projects such as
IBM’s new buildings.
Over the course of its publication, Arts & Architecture included many different
perspectives regarding urban planning and the character of cities, and the tenor and primary
concerns of these pieces also shifted over the decades. Three factors remained consistent: interest
in the visuality and appearance of cities, a concern for the integration or disintegration of cities’
forms, and, finally, a deprioritization of the local urban concerns of Los Angeles. When it came
to inserting architectural photography into the topical debates about urbanism and solutions to
blight and disorder, however, Arts & Architecture abstained, instead prioritizing illustration for
the individual architectural projects shown. The dearth of visual material used to support
137
discussions of urbanism meant that photography was artificially separated from the “city” as a
unit of inquiry.
Entenza included authors with an interest in intervening on postwar urbanism. In June
1945, Francis Violich’s article “The Esthetics of City and Region” analyzed urbanism through
the terms and conditions of both aesthetics and art. Violich, a landscape architect and professor
of city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley, argued that American
cities were in such confusion and disorder that residents could no longer pass esthetic judgment
on their surroundings. While Violich proposed small, practical actions to help achieve an
“esthetically integrated city…related to the needs of all people,” his primary arguments were
theoretical. What could amend this perceptual impoverishment, Violich proposed, would be a
consideration of cities as works of art: “The city as an art form offers a canvas of huge scale,
using for materials the form, space, and structure of streets and buildings, parks, and open space
for human use and enjoyment.”
282
Violich envisioned an integrated world in which art could take
the form of a two-dimensional canvas or a multi-dimensional urban space, which would allow art
critics, those trained in esthetics, to take on the problem of cities.
The term integration had
multiple connotations in the context of the magazine during the 1940s. The most significant to
the magazine was borrowed from Bauhaus thinking and application by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and
influenced the magazine throughout its tenure. In this epistemological model, an integrated world
meant one where humans and technology worked in cooperation and harmony to achieve a better
and more functional world. It was a theory that directly addressed general fears toward
proliferating technologies and machineries taking over human subjectivities, and provided a way
for people, in the role of integrators, to take back control and use technology for higher purposes.
282
Francis Violich, “The Esthetics of City and Region,” Arts & Architecture Magazine 65, no. 6 (June 1945):
138
Yet the word also carried a racial connotation related to the affirmative action to end segregated
institutions.
283
Articles like Violich’s articulated the interrelatedness between place and aesthetics
central to the magazine’s vision of world-building through architecture and the related arts. In
spite of the practicality espoused by Entenza in 1945 in announcing the Case Study House
Program—the need for immediate solutions to the housing shortage and material shortages
postwar—it likewise framed itself as a serious aesthetic proposition for the region. The program
was intended to alter the “shape and form” of postwar living and completely overhaul the symbol
of ‘house’ that had signified an out-of-date lifestyle in the public’s mind for too long. As we
know, photography became paramount for the dissemination, stylization, and fame of the CSH
Program, but no such visual infrastructure developed to support efforts at visually improving the
city beyond the unit of the single-family home.
284
In fact, by the 1950s it became clear that architectural photography, for Arts &
Architecture, was not being deployed as a tool to aid social change, whether in the form of city
planning or in the aid of global cultural initiatives such as those advertised through the UNESCO
courier. In the March 1955 issue, the magazine featured a two-page spread about Edward
Steichen’s pivotal Family of Man exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art by
reprinting Carl Sandburg’s prologue and five installation shots by Ezra Stoller (fig. 2.30). It was
283
In Arts & Architecture, the use of the term in a racial context was infrequent but nonetheless appeared. More
commonly when discussing race or minorities articles would refer to “discrimination” or “prejudice,” and only once
did it refer to “racism.” Throughout the decades, however, integration as a concept appeared with regularity when
referring to arts and design. Jennifer Delton has shown that, beginning in the early 1940s, management organizations
published pamphlets and articles to inform corporations, through distilled social scientific research, about the
importance of various issues surrounding minorities in the workplace and fair employment. Delton, Racial
Integration in Corporate America, 1940-1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
284
In much literature coming out of city planning fields in the early 1940s, the established form for visualizing
cities was the aerial photograph, which was used both as a technical tool for planners and as a publicity tool for
showing a city to its public, but no such photos were used in Arts & Architecture.
139
by far the magazine’s most significant feature on a photography exhibition. The amount of
scholarship on Family of Man has situated it as one of the most complex events of photography’s
exhibition and production of political subjectivity.
285
Even though scholars have since
demonstrated that Family of Man’s use of photography was anything but straightforward, its
uncritical advertisement in Arts & Architecture reduced the representational complexities,
supporting what has been criticized as the most obvious pandering of the show: portraiture as a
vehicle of a global humanism.
286
Indeed, it furthered the artificial divide between the different
types of photographies shown in the magazine: portraiture as that which warranted consideration,
and architectural photography as that which was the illustrative.
Aside from its assertion of portraiture as the photographic form best suited for engaging
with global political issues, Arts & Architecture’s advertisement of Family of Man was followed
on the next page by an article in a series on urban redevelopment and renewal written by Ira
Bach, executive director of Chicago’s land-clearance commission. As early as December 1943,
the magazine had included writing on urban renewal as an approach to urban blight.
287
Placed
pages after the Family of Man spread, Bach’s urban renewal proposals were boosted by the feel-
good humanism of Sandburg’s words and Stoller’s installation shots. The magazine’s focus on
urban renewal via Chicago was in part practical because the city had embarked on several
285
See Roland Barthes, “La grande famille des hommes” (“The Great Family of Man”), in Mythologies
(Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1957), 173–76; Christopher Phillips, “The Judgment Seat of Photography,” October, no.
22 (1982): 27 – 63; Allan Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs,” Art Journal 41, no. 1 (1981): 15 – 21.
286
Scholars have nuanced and contested this criticism. See Blake Stimson, The Pivot of the World: Photography and
its Nation (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006); Fred Turner, “The Family of Man and the Politics of Attention
in Cold War America,” Public Culture 24, no. 1 (2012): 55-84.
287
As Eric Avila, Mark H. Rose and others have shown, urban renewal does not refer to a single policy but
encompasses a range of discourses on urbanism, slum clearance, and city planning that began emerging after the
World War II and intensified with the Housing Act of 1949. Avila and Rose, “Race, Culture, Politics, and Urban
Renewal, An Introduction,” Journal of Urban History 35, no. 3 (March 2009): 335-47.
140
aggressive and fast-moving projects in the mid-1950s.
288
On the other hand, locating urban
renewal in Chicago conceptually staged Los Angeles as a blank slate, a city where urban renewal
might be happening but the magazine, at least, was not taking notice, nor attempting to document
it, despite several large projects already underway in the Chavez Ravine and Bunker Hill
neighborhoods.
289
At a time when photography was being praised for showing people around the
world, it was failing to capture the realities of the urban landscape on a local scale in Los
Angeles. It was not until the final years of Travers’s editorship that the realities of LA’s
problems surfaced explicitly in the magazine. This appearance set up a conflict because the
magazine lacked the pictorial structure through which to visualize such issues.
Ultimately, the magazine only engaged directly with problems of Los Angeles’s urban
landscape when it concerned issues of historic preservation. Jules Lagnsner, itinerant art critic in
the 1950s, wrote two articles – one in July 1951 and another in September 1959 – on Sam
Rodia’s Watts Towers. The 1951 issue was heavily illustrated with photographs of the towers
and an image of the structure was featured on the cover, but the article focused primarily on
Rodia (fig. 2.31). The second article, in 1959, focused solely on the city’s demolition of the
towers. Langsner strongly condemned the plans, referring to the towers as the city’s artistic
heritage.
290
288
Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1983).
289
Urban renewal in Los Angeles has largely been associated with the building of freeways and the demolition of
mostly nonwhite neighborhoods that accompanied these massive infrastructure projects. Urban renewal also affected
Los Angeles’s urban landscape in other ways. But its pattern differed from other major US cities because Los
Angeles had major growth at least three decades after cities like Chicago and New York. Where other major US
cities struggled economically after the war, Los Angeles’s economy boomed thanks to several wartime industries
that remained in the city and transitioned into lateral manufacturing capacities. See Eric Avila, The Folklore of the
Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), Cuff,
Provisional Cities.
290
Arts & Architecture Magazine 68, no. 7 (July 1951); Arts & Architecture Magazine 76, no. 9 (September 1959).
141
The second preservation issue that Arts & Architecture repeatedly addressed concerned
architect Irving Gill’s historic Dodge House, finished in 1916 and representative of Gill’s
signature hybrid style combining Spanish Colonial Revival elements with modernist design .
Spearheaded by Esther McCoy, who decried the “speculative profiteering abetted by fishy land
use decisions,” the magazine printed the concerned letters to the Los Angeles County Board of
Education, which owned the property and planned to sell it to private developers.
291
One issue
included photographs of the house and property by Marvin Rand, Shulman, and McCoy (fig.
2.32).
292
In both cases, the magazine’s advocacy for Los Angeles manifested through single
buildings – it rarely extended to the aforementioned urban redevelopment projects, only once
including an article on Bunker Hill, long before the actual project was underway.
293
In both
cases, moreover, the magazine’s editors, by way of photography, pitted the magazine and its
championing of architecture against a reckless and careless city willing to destroy its most
precious architectural assets. This meant that architectural photography could be positioned in
fact against the greater idea of the city of L.A.
Editor Travers framed the Dodge House issue specifically through the city’s need to hold
onto its sparse, short cultural history. And the history of Los Angeles, he argued, needed
buildings to exist in order for it to be understood: “no matter how thoroughly a valuable building
such as Dodge House is documented photographically, it cannot be truly assessed as architecture
or used as a guide unless seen in the flesh.”
294
Even though this reiterated a common trope,
especially amongst architects, of the experiential shortcomings of architectural photography,
291
The magazine devoted editorials and articles in several issues in the mid-1960s to the Dodge House controversy.
David Travers, “Notes in Passing” Arts & Architecture Magazine 82, no.4 (April 1965): 14.
292
Arts & Architecture Magazine 80, no. 10 (October 1963); Arts & Architecture Magazine 82, no.9 (September
1965).
293
It published an article on Bunker Hill in 1943. Arts & Architecture Magazine 60, no. 7 (July 1943): n.p.
294
David Travers, “Notes in Passing,” Arts & Architecture 80, no. 10 (October 1963): 10.
142
Travers’s opinion nonetheless articulated important stances for a magazine that, by this time, was
on the decline. Yet again, photography is positioned contra the city: the medium is unable to
stave off or save the city from urban development. Travers’s desire to hold on to the small
amount of “history we’ve got” in Southern California reveals a deeper fear of a city whose
history would be enacted only through photography. Rather than attempt to turn cameras to Los
Angeles’s streets and urban landscapes in order to scrutinize the way such historic buildings fit
into a larger urban fabric, in the context of urban development Arts & Architecture reluctantly
relied on architectural photography in its most reduced capacity: to document in case a building
gets destroyed, knowing this documentation would not be insufficient.
Its focus on historic preservation as the primary issue affecting Los Angeles in the 1960s
reveals a larger ideological shift not significantly addressed in Arts & Architecture. In the early
1960s and gaining popularity at the end of the decade, a new generation of architects and urban
theorists began studying cities such as Los Angeles and Las Vegas as exemplary of a new kind
of postmodern urbanism, and as inspirational for new styles of architectural and urban design.
Figures including urban theorist Kevin Lynch, architects Denise Scott-Brown, Robert Venturi,
and Steven Izenour, and architectural historian Reyner Banham did not limit their inquiries
solely on Los Angeles’s modernist architectural masterpieces, instead turning to the city in its
entirety, including its cluttered boulevards, prevalent car culture, its billboards, and its flatness.
These authors and architects had different investments in the urban landscape—Lynch was more
interested in reforming the city and providing more legibility to it than Banham was, for
instance—but they had in common an interest in the city’s image, and in artists and
photographers who experimented with this image. In the books and studies they published, they
did not rely solely on commercial architectural photographs to convey their arguments: Scott-
143
Brown and Venturi, for instance, used photography by conceptual artist Ed Ruscha, as did
Reyner Banham. Kevin Lynch took his own photographs as part of the field research for his The
Image of the City (1960).
Despite its ideal position through which to publicize and celebrate this new generation of
architects and urbanists bringing new attention to the city of Los Angeles, Arts & Architecture
ended just before any of them, aside from Lynch, had begun to significantly engage with L.A.’s
urban landscape. An April 1965 article by Venturi in the magazine, his only appearance, titled
“A Justification for a Pop Architecture,” featured conventional architectural photographs of
projects in Philadelphia by George Pohl.
295
Venturi did not mention his views on urbanism or
Los Angeles, which he would develop through a studio he and his partner Scott Brown ran at
Yale beginning in 1968.
296
Thus, because of the timing of its closure, Arts & Architecture did not
cover much in the way of postmodern architecture, and it also missed an opportunity to
experiment with photography and its representations of urban architecture as did the
aforementioned figures.
Venturi and others put photographs to new uses and, in so doing, advanced new artists
and photographers as those best equipped to document the urban studies, suggesting in effect a
new generation of architectural photography. In his artist book Every Building on the Sunset
Strip, Ed Ruscha carefully experimented with the best way to depict the street’s buildings
295
“Robert Venturi,” Arts & Architecture Magazine 82, no.4 (April 1965): 22.
296
This architecture lab would be the beginning of their inquiry into Los Angeles and Las Vegas, culminating in the
watershed publication Learning from Las Vegas, heavily illustrated with photographs and drawings, and including
photographic street-level views taken by Ruscha that imitated viewing the street from out of a moving car, a
markedly different approach to representing architecture from the commercial architectural photography featured in
Arts & Architecture. Martino Stierli, Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror: The City in Theory, Photography, and Film
(Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010); Robert Venturi, et al., Learning from Las Vegas. (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1972); Aron Vinegar, I Am a Monument: On Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press, 2008).
144
through photography, despite accounts that have framed his photographic work as deadpan,
unskilled, and disinterested in the craft of photography (fig. 2.33).
297
By contrast, after several
test shoots involving different cameras, angles, and approaches , Ruscha settled on an elaborate
set up with a tripod in the back of his pick-up truck, which he would slowly drive down the street
and snap photos with a rig that automatically advanced the film, a set-up as conspicuous and
performative as Esther McCoy’s parodic photographer. Figuring out the best way to depict the
urban streetscape required extensive formal and technical work with photography, and in this
way Ruscha carried on the fastidious work with which commercial architectural photographers
such as Shulman depicted individual buildings.
The closest the editorial vision got to expressing a new stance towards Los Angeles came
right at the end of its run. In May 1966, Travers went on a tirade over the state of Los Angeles
and the criminal negligence of its government. “While we slaughter ourselves in disproportionate
numbers on our streets,” Travers wrote, the City Council gave away land in East Los Angeles,
where parks were desperately needed. “Our mayor visits Vietnam but avoid Watts,” Travers
continued – the first direct mention in the magazine of the Watts Uprising from ten months
earlier. What he criticized the most, however, was the very idea of Los Angeles as an object of
study:
…perhaps we should, as Reyner Banham suggested only half in jest, continue as we are.
After all, it would be no terrible loss he said; Los Angeles is only one city among thousands,
and by destroying itself it could be of great benefit as an object lesson. That’s an optimistic
297
David Bourdon, “Ruscha as Publisher (or All Booked Up).” Artnews, 71, no. 2 (1972): 32–36; Benjamin H.D.
Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October
55 (Winter 1990): 105-143; Kevin Hatch, “‘Something Else’: Ed Ruscha’s Photographic Books,” October 111
(Winter 2005): 107-126; Virginia Heckert, Ed Ruscha and Some Los Angeles Apartments (Los Angeles: Getty
Publications, 2013); Sylvia Wolf. Ed Ruscha and Photography (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art,
2004).
145
line to take, however. Even a glance at the rest of the world is enough to show that there’s
more than a bit of Southern California in everyone.
298
Travers, the editorial staff, and the contributors did not know what to do about the city to which
their publication was devoted, it seemed.
299
Travers’s words intimate the way that Los Angeles
had always existed as an ambivalent subject in the magazine. Travers’s premise that Southern
California is, in a sense, everywhere, had influenced the magazine over its entire tenure, albeit in
different forms. Los Angeles had been the ground on which the magazine could host discourse
on international modernist design and architecture, vanguard debates about art, and liberal
humanist takes on the nature of the world. This framework had given Los Angeles a seat at the
table of these conversations but, in order to do so, Entenza had disavowed interrogations of local
urban problems. The architectural photography used in the publication was not equipped to
illustrate or represent the specificity of problems in Los Angeles within the confines of the
magazine.
In 1968, Denise Scott Brown reviewed recent, vanguard European little magazines and
their thinking on reimagining cities. She expressed skepticism towards the cities that some
editors envisioned, cities “made to look like machine products,” because they don't account for
the “interrelated activities,” or the social, political and cultural relations, that she argues comprise
the true nature of urban places. “What would they make of Los Angeles?” Brown asked, which
she believed portended the future problems of cities overly designed, sterile, and built to function
298
David Travers, “Notes in Passing,” Arts & Architecture 83, no. 5 (May 1966): 7.
299
Travers’ concern over the city’s disorder mirrored larger debates in architecture and urbanism fields that instead
decried the urbanism that figures such as Banham, Venturi, and Scott Brown celebrated. In 1964, architect Peter
Blake published God's Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America's Landscape, a diatribe against the
chaotic, poorly planned cities and places in the United States, ruined by commercialization and lack of governmental
oversight. Blake’s book was also illustrated by myriad photographs, but rarely did it include what we might think of
as the conventional commercial architectural photograph. Blake, God’s Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration
of America’s Landscape (New York: Holt, 1964).
146
like computers? With the “violent conflicts of scale” that have erupted in the city, Los Angeles
modeled how the social and political could not be muted through highly controlled urban
design.
300
Scott Brown's article helps further explain why Arts & Architecture's vision for the
city made less sense by the late 1960s. Scott Brown's article intimates the increasingly dominant
opinion of architects who no longer believed in the methods and ideas of architectural
modernism as they could be applied to major urban centers. Even little magazines, whose editors
experimented with their use of cartoons, collaged photography, and other intermedial
comparisons to reimagine a new kind of urban image, failed, in Scott Brown's estimate, to
account for the way cities were functioning in the period. Scott Brown further proves that
Travers' assessment of Los Angeles was astute, that he was right in intuiting that the city had
exceeded the reach and imageability of magazines and the photography that supported them.
Travers’ concern with the city of Los Angeles, however, read as belated and half-hearted.
He did not stage an overhaul of the magazine to address the problems of the city, nor did he use
photographic resources to reimagine the relationship between urbanism and visuality. As
architects and urbanists both celebrated and condemned the disorder and chaos of cities, they did
so by turning their attention away from individual buildings and towards cities as a whole. Under
this model, the way photographs were used to capture urban space changed, and the very idea of
architectural photography was put under new pressure to do more than symbolize a city through
individual architectural projects. It was no longer viable, by 1967, to avoid representing Los
Angeles as a whole, and only show the highlights of its modernist achievements. By condemning
the local political conditions, Travers moved closer to a new model of Southern California as an
“object lesson”: local conflagrations, he showed, indicate global crises, but never achieved a
300
Denise Scott Brown, “Little Magazines in Architecture and Urbanism,” Journal of the American Institute of
Planners 34, no. 4 (1968): 230.
147
marrying of photo and text in a way that could have established a new role for the magazine in
the changing fields of architecture and design.
What these later urbanists demonstrate and what their appreciation of photography by
figures such as Ruscha shows is that the tenets of commercial architectural photography were not
wholesale rejected. Instead, this younger generation of creators picked up where the Arts &
Architecture generation left off, but they thought more intently about how to create a city’s
image through photography and other visual media. An individual photograph of a building was
freed from its responsibility of representing the city: now, it could be every building on Sunset
Strip, pasted together in a book format, that could adopt the burden of the image of Los Angeles.
Conclusion
Architectural photography in the magazine remained consistent in its documentation of
the waning modernist architecture and design experimentation in the late 1960s. The
particularities through which its identity formed within a changing Los Angeles and within Arts
& Architecture demonstrates that the medium could uphold the sanctity of its subject matter to a
fault, even when the object was under extreme scrutiny. After several failed attempts to save the
magazine by soliciting new publishers, Travers’s Arts & Architecture was forced to make the last
issue July/August 1967.
301
The cover is a close-up, black-and-white photograph of water
cascading downwards, showing no architecture, as if dematerializing any suggestion of its
previous relevance to the publication (fig. 2.34). The cover resonated with many of the abstract
photographic covers that the magazine began to print, showing snippets of architectural projects.
301
There was hope until the very last issue that a new publisher would buy the publication and restart it with a new
focus on environmental and social issues. David Travers, Interview with Daniel Díez Martínez. In Daniel Díez
Martínez, “ADS & ARTS & ARCHITECTURE: La publicidad de la revista Arts & Architecture en la construcción
de la imagen de las arquitecturas del sur de California (1938-1967),” Ph.D. Thesis (Universidad Politécnica de
Madrid, 2016).
148
Uncharacteristically, the issue had a theme: water and the environment. Travers edited the issue
as a proposal of what he had hoped Arts & Architecture could have become under a new editor: a
socially engaged publication that addressed humans’ impact on their environment. “Architecture
is no longer a question of habitation but of habitat,” Travers wrote, “there is need for a journal
which focuses on all aspects of living and building in the new urbanized world.”
302
Containing
very few photographs and no spreads on architectural projects, the issue included a grid of three
by five photographs of the Libby Dam – drawing a striking parallel back to the magazine’s
January 1935 issue that celebrated the Boulder Dam. In casting off its relationship to architecture
in the final issue and refocusing on local and state environment issues, Arts & Architecture also
ended its relationship to architectural photography. Travers’ proposed new direction seemed
mostly text based, an interest in photography’s contribution to a socially engaged publication not
articulated or suggested. As the photographic covers became increasingly abstract in the 1960s,
as with this final issue, paradoxically is when Travers began to focus more on social issues
affecting Los Angeles. It was as if, as the issues became more socially informed, the photographs
no longer served any purpose to aid in conveying these ideas, so they just became abstract or
absent instead.
Outside of the pages Arts & Architecture, however, architectural photography continued
to flourish. Even as several significant architectural publications folded in the 1960s,
photographers such as Shulman received an increasing number of jobs from international
architects and large corporations. Ezra Stoller founded his architectural photography agency Esto
Photographics in 1966. Shulman also branched out and started photographing for architecture
initiatives invested anew in the environment. His photographs for projects such as the AIA and
302
David Travers, “Water Resources in North America, Notes in Passing,” Arts & Architecture 84, no. 7
(July/August 1967): 8.
149
Architectural Panel’s 1964 Environment USA exhibition at the California Museum of Science
and Industry and other venues featured in Arts & Architecture in July 1964, turned beyond the
individual building to broader urban landscapes around Los Angeles. The show included a wide
range of photographs of urban environments, housing projects, and infrastructures. It was thus
merely the parameter of the magazine that foreclosed upon architectural photography’s fully
entering an expanded and more socially engaged field of representation. Ultimately, within the
pages of Arts & Architecture, architectural photography could not cross the categorical and
institutional limits that bounded it to its subject matter. It remained confined to the limits of its
budget and source of photographs—mostly architectural firms—and thus to a mostly
conventional visual program.
In spite of its hermetic and trade-specific reputation, commercial architectural
photography had always been about more than just the architecture represented. The
unorthodoxy of Arts & Architecture created conditions under which architectural photography
was pushed to certain limits concerning its representational and categorical bounds. As
photographers and artists increasingly turned to photography as the medium through which to
gaze critically at cities and not just buildings in the 1960s, commercial architectural photography
served as the visual ground on which broader debates and contestations about urban landscapes
unfolded.
150
Chapter 3—Harry Drinkwater and the Limits of Architectural Photography, 1966-69
In 1966, the year after the Watts uprising had rattled the city of Los Angeles, a White
woman regards a wall of news photographs taken during and after the uprising (fig. 3.1). Slightly
out of focus, the news photographs are mounted on mottled, worn wooden planks in a rich
variety of dark tones. By contrast, the woman’s appearance emits homogeneous, lighter tones,
from her neatly cut bob to her simple, sleeveless dress, which compliments the plain curtain
beside her. The curtain further differentiates the woman from the wall of photographs, as it splits
the frame nearly in half. Turned away from the camera, she looks toward an aerial photograph of
a plume of smoke rising into the air. To her left is a bulbous sculpture of metal baubles displayed
on a table. Shot at a slightly low angle, the photograph conveys the anodyne scene at a remove,
allowing viewers to assess the multiple subjects on display. Although the woman is captured in
the act of looking, the photograph does not give access to her expression or response. The viewer
is distanced, unsure of how the news photographs relate to the sculpture and how to understand
the woman perceiving them. What is the viewer to make of a white woman witnessing scenes of
Black oppression and revolt, in an exhibition staged by two Black men, being photographed by a
Black professional photographer? The photograph does not answer easily.
The photograph documents artist Noah Purifoy’s collaborative exhibition 66 Signs of
Neon (1966–69), which opened in response to the uprising. On August 11, 1965, Los Angeles
Police Department (LAPD) officers pulled over Marquette Frye and his brother on suspicion of
drunk driving in Watts, a predominately Black and poor community in South Los Angeles.
Frustration over decades of disenfranchisement and violent police oppression came to a head,
and thousands of residents took to the streets, some setting fire to buildings, robbing businesses,
and fighting the LAPD and the National Guard, who staged an aggressive, militarized response.
151
Violence ebbed and flowed over six days, with thirty-four dead, most killed by LAPD officers.
The uprising resulted in millions in material damage and the neighborhood was left littered with
charred trash and destroyed infrastructure.
Purifoy, who had served as the director of the Watts Towers Art Center until 1965, felt
compelled to make sense of the August events. He and artist Judson Powell ventured through
Watts to gather over three tons of debris and remains from buildings, signs, and streets. This
material formed the foundation of what became 66 Signs of Neon. Featuring collaborative works
by eight artists, the exhibition consisted of sixty-six sculptural assemblages comprised of junk
wreckage and was first exhibited in March 1966 at Markham Junior High as part of the Watts
Renaissance of the Arts Festival and then at small venues in California; Washington, D.C.; and
Europe.
303
In an essay titled “The Art of Communication as a Creative Act,” included in Junk Art,
the single-issue magazine that served as an exhibition catalogue for 66 Signs of Neon, Purifoy
wrote of the project’s myriad goals, which transform into increasingly abstract and theoretical
premises as he proceeded. 66 Signs of Neon was the following: an exhibition comprised of
“artifacts” from the uprising; a response to the official government report on the uprising, the
McCone Commission; a “one-to-one format of communication” between people, especially
those who would not otherwise speak to each other; and an “evolving system of philosophy.”
While the essay explores the project’s philosophical foundations in several directions, Purifoy
concluded by arguing that in, a fearful and anxiety-ridden world, “the only hope is
303
The exhibition travelled to nine venues total, in Southern California, the Bay Area, Washington, D.C., and
Germany. Most of the venues were university art museums. Karen Anne Mason, “African-American Artists of Los
Angeles: Noah Purifoy,” Oral History Program, University of California, Los Angeles, 1990.; Yael Lipschutz.
“Noah Purifoy: Through the Fire,” PhD Diss. (University of Southern California, 2013).
152
communication between individuals: ‘I DON’T HAVE ANYBODY BUT YOU!’” he
implored.
304
66 Signs of Neon has been historicized for how its artists explored racial identity through
sculptural assemblage practices, an understudied perspective on assemblage and pop art in 1960s
American art.
305
Inspired at least in part by Purifoy’s own capacious framing of the project’s
goals, scholars have argued for the project’s significance from multiple angles, positioning it as a
celebration of Black life in Watts and as a searing critique of the White, bourgeois consumerism
cultivated by California modern design.
306
Figure 3.1 invites another perspective that until now
has gone unconsidered: the importance of photography to 66 Signs of Neon.
Purifoy’s friend and collaborator, commercial architectural photographer Harry
Drinkwater (1919-2014), took the photograph; Purifoy hired him to document both the
assemblage sculptures individually and the show as it was installed in multiple venues in Los
Angeles. Tasked with photographing, in his words, 66 Signs of Neon’s “concept,” Drinkwater
also acted as a quasi-project manager for the Junk Art exhibition catalogue, which was illustrated
with his photographs.
307
Drinkwater’s photographs are the most significant visual record of 66
Signs of Neon that exists. In addition to showing how the exhibition was installed, they preserve
304
Noah Purifoy, “The Art of Communication as a Creative Act,” in Junk Art (Los Angeles: 66 Signs of Neon,
1966), 1.
305
Kellie Jones, South of Pico: African-American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2017); Christopher Knight, “Art Review: An Overlooked Journey,” Los Angeles Times February 8,
1997, section F, 10.; Richard Cándida Smith, The Modern Moves West: California Artists and Democratic Culture
in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Daniel Widener, Black Arts West:
Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).
306
Luci Bradnock and Rani Singh, “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag: Crafting an Art Scene,” in Pacific Standard
Time, 120; Lipschutz, “Noah Purifoy: Through the Fire”; Franklin Sirmans and Yael Lipschutz, Noah Purifoy: Junk
Dada (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2015); Lisa Uddin, “And thus not Glowing Brightly:
Noah Purifoy’s Junk Modernism,” in Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to
the Present, eds. Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis III, Mabel O. Wilson (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 2020), 318-19; Cécile Whiting, Pop L.A.:Art and the City in the 1960s (University of California Press, 2006).
307
Yael Lipschutz and Marissa Kucheck, “Modern Art in Los Angeles: Harry Drinkwater Oral History Interview"
(Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010), 22.
153
a view of the assemblage sculptures, most of which were destroyed in transit from the
exhibition’s final and only international venue in Germany. As the only representation of the
news photographs that were hung for 66 Signs of Neon, Drinkwater’s documentation also
recovers the role of photography as it was used within the show itself. Until now, his
contribution has remained mostly unaddressed and the photographs exist scattered across various
archives.
308
When they have been included in scholarship about 66 Signs of Neon, authors have
treated the photographs as straightforward illustrations of the exhibition, instead of considering
how they reinforce or reject the meaning of the project.
309
This article returns to Drinkwater’s photographs in the context of commercial
architectural photography in Los Angeles to explore the work they do. Purifoy’s philosophy of
communication—exemplified in the urgent adage “I don’t have anybody but you!”—is absent in
the photographs, whose subjects remain sequestered from each other. The photographs, instead,
engage with another perspective on the project that Purifoy also articulated in Junk Art: “the
assemblage of junk,” Purifoy wrote, “illustrated for the artists the imposition of order on
disorder, the creation of beauty from ugliness.”
310
Drinkwater, I suggest, imposed a visual idiom
of order on his subjects and staged this order as photographic rather than sculptural. His
photographs present multiple subjects—news photographs, sculpture, the viewer—at a measured
distance. The formal orderliness of these photographs forecloses the questions about race,
representation, and racialized viewing that the details of the scenes otherwise provoke.
308
Drinkwater has never been the subject of a scholarly book or article but was featured in a 2011 exhibition at the
Roberts Projects gallery, titled L.A. Object: Harry Drinkwater and Bruce Talamon. His archive is held at the Getty
Research Institute (GRI). Harry Drinkwater photographs documenting Los Angeles art and architecture, 1950-2004,
The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Accession no. 2011.R.23.
309
Yael Lipschutz discusses Drinkwater’s relationship to Purifoy but does not elaborate on Drinkwater’s
photographs. Kellie Jones uses many of Drinkwater’s photographs in her treatment of Purifoy’s assemblage practice
but does not address Drinkwater himself. Lipschutz, “Through the Fire”; Jones, South of Pico.
310
Noah Purifoy, “The Art of Communication as a Creative Act,” in Junk Art (Los Angeles: 66 Signs of Neon,
1966), 8.
154
I argue that Drinkwater approached his 66 Signs of Neon assignment as an architectural
photographer. By the time he met Purifoy, Drinkwater had worked for several prominent
architects, interior designers, urban landscape designers, and furniture companies in Los
Angeles. Through such commissions, he perfected the act of representing scenes from a
balanced, orderly distance, such as when he photographed a staged interior for designer John H.
Smith (fig. 3.2). Taken at an oblique angle, Drinkwater’s photograph opens the room, giving a
sense of its spaciousness. The diagonal swoop of the chair intersects with a low bench behind,
and the interplay of furniture and decoration are photographed so as to give the space an
organized appearance and visual legibility. The various contributions to the design are framed in
equal and supposedly neutral relation to one another. By borrowing such formal techniques from
the idiom of architectural photography, Drinkwater’s photographs of 66 Signs of Neon
contributed to a widespread desire for architectural and urban order in 1960s Los Angeles.
Urbanists, architects, politicians, and artists wrote of the need to amend the chaos rampant in
United States cities, of which Los Angeles was exemplary. Commercial architectural
photography united these various stakeholders by visualizing what urban order looked like in
many forms, even when connected to an exhibition of junk assemblages.
That photography imposes its own perspective on its subjects has been a successfully
defended battle for art historians in the quest to secure a seat at the table for photography in
canons of American art and visual culture.
311
Yet commercial photography and photography
taken of exhibitions too often remain siloed as straight documentation. This chapter proposes a
way to begin writing more expansive art histories regarding commercial photographers and their
311
See François Brunet, “Robert Taft: Historian of Photography as Mass Medium,” American Art 27, no. 2 (2013):
25-32; Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Matthew Brady to Walker Evans
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1989).
155
projects. Drinkwater’s identity as a Black professional photographer, moreover, reveals
understudied ways that commercial photography conditioned racialized and politicized viewing
in the period. Black professional photographers often faced the dilemma of how to represent
Black life within the constraints of assignments, intended for mostly White audiences; the first
time that LIFE Magazine printed a photographic essay by a Black photographer, for instance,
was when Gordon Parks followed Black gangs in Harlem in 1948, yet he had little control over
how the editorial staff used his photographs to convey the narrative.
312
When Drinkwater
photographed 66 Signs of Neon, any artistic or cultural project in Watts implied a political stance
on the uprising. In avoiding a clear stance on how to better the Black community in Watts,
Drinkwater’s photographs intimate the difficulty of assembling a unified political response to
urban uprising through art. As Nicole Fleetwood has argued, there has, especially in the latter
half of the twentieth century, been a “weight placed on black cultural production to produce
results, to do something to alter a history and system of racial inequality that is in part constituted
through visual discourse.”
313
In light of Drinkwater’s work, scholars must reconsider the role
played by photography in complicating the certitude of artists’ political gestures made in
response to urban uprising and racialized oppression, so often polarized as either for or against
Black liberation.
314
Los Angeles through Drinkwater’s Photography
Stationed in England during World War II with an all-Black communications corps,
Harry Drinkwater first intuited the possibilities of a career in photography when taking group
312
Russell Lord, ed.,Gordon Parks: The Making of an Argument (Göttingen: Steidl, 2013).
313
Nicole R. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago and London: University
of Chicago Press, 2011), 3.
314
The art historian Darby English has noted that what he terms “black representational space” has been a limiting
signifier for Black artists, with unified stances on race too easily read into their works. English, How to See a Work
of Art in Total Darkness (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007).
156
photographs of his company.
315
Like many commercial architectural photographers of his
generation, he did not properly begin his career until the late 1940s, when he moved to Los
Angeles at a time when modern building in the city proliferated. After finishing school at the
Fred Archer School of Photography on the GI Bill, Drinkwater worked for two Black-run
newspapers: the Eagle from 1947-49, for which he photographed the opening of architect Paul
Revere Williams’ Golden State Mutual Life Insurance building, and The Sentinel from 1949-55
(fig. 3.3). Drinkwater generally worked freelance. He photographed for a variety of clients in Los
Angeles, such as the architects William Pereira and Charles Luckman, the designer Tommy
Greene, and the screen company Kelsey Screens; he traveled once to Mexico to photograph
modernist architect Félix Candela’s buildings, but his car was burglarized and most of the
negatives stolen.
316
Drinkwater also photographed interior design and staged rooms for John H.
Smith, the first Black designer admitted to the American Institute of Design. An undated
photograph by Drinkwater shows Smith inside John Lautner’s Chemosphere house, for which
Smith did the interior design (fig. 3.4). Through Williams and Smith, Drinkwater became
connected with several Black designers and architects, which is how he met Purifoy, who had
also been working in modern furniture design in the 1950s.
317
While formally trained in photography, Drinkwater learned how to photograph
architecture by observing and meeting established commercial architectural photographers in the
city. He would also travel around by car for many of his assignments, learning to photograph
many different built environments throughout the city (fig. 3.5). By the 1960s, several American
architectural photographers had written articles and books about the genre, laying out both the
315
Lipschutz and Kucheck, “Modern Art in Los Angeles,” 4.
316
Ibid.
317
Ibid.
157
nature of the profession and articulating how to take a good architectural photograph. The
architectural photographer G.E. Kidder Smith wrote in 1965 of the fourteen points that should
govern photography for the architect, as he phrased it, but emphasized that above all else one had
to be able to “‘see’ photographically,” regardless of the subject.
318
The photographer Ezra Stoller
had more exacting standards: architectural photographs should accurately record the architect’s
idea: “objectivity may be only relative, but we must be concerned with it constantly.”
319
Shulman, by contrast, elaborated on the artistry of the genre. While the architectural photograph
needed to service the design pictured, it also had the ability to “transcend the mere physical
recording.”
320
These three men also elaborated on proper lighting, composition, and staging of
architectural photographs. Their framing of these formal strategies gives insight into how a
visual idiom of distance, objectivity, spatial balance, and order were becoming the standard
approach to commercial architectural photography. For Kidder Smith, these principles included
keeping the camera level, relating the foreground of a shot to the rest of the building to highlight
relationality between everything in a scene, and treating the human figure as a “compositional
element,” meant to give vitality to a building or space without dominating it.
321
Shulman echoed
this last point, reminding readers to avoid live subjects becoming too “conspicuous,” and
especially emphasized that photographers needed to portray “all the major elements and
relationships” of a space. But balancing all the objects in the scene was not enough. The
318
G.E. Kidder Smith, “Photography for the Architect,” RIBA Journal 72 (September 1965): 457.
319
Ezra Stoller, “Photography and the Language of Architecture,” Perspecta 8 (1963): 43.
320
Julius Shulman, Photographing Architecture and Interiors (New York: Whitney Publications, 1962), 2.
321
Kidder Smith, “Photography,” 458.
158
photograph also had to guide viewers so that “the eye is not allowed to wander, that each area
shown has a specific point of interest, and that the viewer's eyes are literally controlled.”
322
With this guidance in mind, producing a good architectural photograph was no simple
assignment: objectively driven, it must exhibit a controlled scene that highlights all elements of a
space and balances both the documentation of a design and the artistry of photography.
Drinkwater’s photographs put these principles to work. For example, taken for the urban
landscape designer Garrett Eckbo’s Urban Landscape Design (1964), one Drinkwater
photograph captures the campus of Ambassador College, located in Pasadena outside of Los
Angeles (fig. 3.6). Drinkwater conveyed the harmony of the landscape design and the college’s
architecture. Using the dramatic diagonals of the building’s roofline and its shadow, he
positioned the building so that it opens to the beauty of the courtyard beyond, highlighting the
popular visual trope in California lifestyle magazines at the time that celebrated the hybrid
indoor-outdoor living possible in the state. The building’s column parallels the trees’ vertical
trunks. The darkness of the building gives way to the courtyard in full sunlight, and yet the
photograph does not prioritize one space over the other, instead encouraging the viewer to read
the scene as interdependent, each element contributing to the overall pleasing effect of the
college’s space.
These formal principles could be applied beyond architectural interiors and exteriors—
namely, to the representation of cities. They dictated how photographs visualized design’s
contribution to a perceived sense of urban order. Eckbo was one of Drinkwater’s longest held
and most important clients, for whom he photographed Los Angeles’s urban landscape, cultural
landmarks, and infrastructure, describing himself once as Eckbo’s “eyes.”
323
Drinkwater’s
322
Shulman, Photographing Architecture, 105.
323
Lipschutz and Kucheck, “Modern Art in Los Angeles,” 13.
159
assignments from Eckbo primarily involved photographing sites used as illustrations for the
landscape architect’s books, one of which made the cover (fig. 3.7). The books were theoretical
as well as practical and Eckbo articulated his arguments, influenced heavily by modernist
architectural and design theory, about landscaping, space, urbanism, sight, and city planning.
Also taken at Ambassador College and published in Urban Landscape Design, Drinkwater
photographed a detail of the campus landscape design, a sculptural fountain (fig. 3.8). The
sculpture, which consists of five vertebrate units, appears in the center of the frame. Its dark base
gives way to lighter water that darkens centrifugally outwards, enclosed by the slight curvature
of the fountain’s edge. On the page next to the fountain photograph, Eckbo narrated the
Ambassador College landscape design project, focusing on fears concerning the area’s
impending disintegration and disorder. Describing Orange Grove Avenue as, in the past, a
wealthy center of good living in Pasadena, Eckbo then complains that its mansions, too
expensive for the current demographic, are “deteriorating,” and “being replaced by luxury
apartments of nondescript design.”
324
Read through Eckbo’s argument, the fountain photograph
takes on an increased valence of revitalization: energetic water streams emanate from the design,
which provides both form and richness to the campus, all part of a larger redevelopment scheme.
Eckbo thus used Drinkwater’s photography as proof of the transformative effects of urban
landscape design.
Because of what the architectural historian Claire Zimmerman has referred to as its
“regime of standard perspective,” commercial architectural photography has troubled scholars
looking to analyze individual images.
325
How does one ascribe agency or intention when the
images are often prescribed and look alike? Its standardizing approach has been cited as proof of
324
Garrett Eckbo, Urban Landscape Design (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964).
325
Zimmerman, Photographic Architecture, 221.
160
its deferral to its subject, a confirmation of the photographers’ lack of originality.
326
Several
critics have homed in on commercial architectural photography as exemplary of photography’s
ills. They connected their dislike of its formal conventions to a more nefarious political agenda.
The journalist Tom Picton complained that architectural photographs “march across the pages of
architectural magazines like tombstones in a graveyard…they provide an impossible dream, a
too possible nightmare.” For Picton, commercial architectural photography’s only language was
that of flattery and of promoting propaganda.
327
Following these criticisms, was Drinkwater’s representation of 66 Signs of Neon an
overreach, imposing a conscripted perspective from his career as an architectural photographer
on the assemblages, news photographs, and subjects viewing them? Precisely because he was so
well versed in the conventions of architectural photography, however, Drinkwater’s work
provides the opportunity to assess how the standard architectural photographic approach altered,
rather than merely flattered, its subjects. While the visual logic of architectural photography
certainly contributed to how the exhibition was portrayed, Drinkwater discloses as much as he
controls, representing the many perspectives embedded in the show but refusing to prioritize one
over another. The photographs make visible the exhibition’s unanswered questions concerning
how to reimagine Watts after the uprising.
Drinkwater’s photographs of 66 Signs of Neon are not included in his archive; instead,
they are scattered across multiple collections, a common occurrence for commercial
326
Cervin Robinson, “Architectural Photography: Complaints about the Standard Product,” in Journal of
Architectural Education, 10.
327
Tom Picton, “‘The Craven Image - Or the Apotheosis of the Architectural Photograph’ (Part One),” Architects’
Journal (1979): 176. Scholars more recently have likewise homed in on the genre’s connection to housing
segregation campaigns and promotion of white, heterosexual nuclear family ideologies. See Dianne Harris,
“Modeling Race and Class: Architectural Photography and the U.S. Gypsum Research Village, 1952–1955,” in Race
and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present) eds. Irene Cheng, Charles L.
Davis III, Mabel O. Wilson (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020).
161
photographers who did not retain the rights to many of their photographs.
328
Most of
Drinkwater’s commercial work exists, on the one hand, as negatives with no record of prints
made or, on the other, as prints in architecture and design books with the negatives lost, and he
did not preserve correspondence related to any of his projects. Other than a single oral history,
there are no records of Drinkwater’s own writing. Precisely because of this, my analysis
contextualizes Drinkwater through the photographic and artistic fields in which he worked,
rather than attempting to intuit his intentions. Furthering Robin Kelsey’s argument that
individual creators—in this case, the photographer—are a “locus of historical negotiation and
subjection, a site where codes may be bent, resisted, or spliced,” I look closely at Drinkwater’s
photographs for how they intimate the challenges of both the assignment and his professional
position. Documenting an artistic response to the largest racial uprising in the history of Los
Angeles meant that the photographer exposed complex perspectives on Watts, the uprising, and
art that have otherwise remained elided.
329
The Visual Order of 66 Signs of Neon
Noah Purifoy would have been familiar with Drinkwater’s work before hiring him; in
fact, it is likely that 66 Signs of Neon was not the first project that Drinkwater photographed on
which Purifoy was involved. After he graduated with a BFA from Chouinard Art Institute in
1957, Purifoy worked for several interior design companies as a window dresser. He also began
collaborating with interior designer John H. Smith on staging interior design rooms that were
displayed at home shows around the city.
330
Drinkwater photographed many of these staged
rooms for Smith. Purifoy, moreover, was familiar with seeing his own assemblages
328
Much remains in the collection of his son, Jafiel Drinkwater.
329
Robin Kelsey, Archive Style: Photographs & Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1850-1890 (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 16.
330
Lipschutz, “Through the Fire,” 9.
162
photographed within a designed interior. In an uncredited photograph from Noah Purifoy’s
scrapbooks in his archive, two artworks by Purifoy hang in Smith’s staged room (fig. 3.9). The
viewer is barely aware that it is a staged room in a convention center: the photograph, taken from
an oblique angle, makes the room and the relationship between the furniture and styling the
center of attention.
The assemblages in 66 Signs of Neon varied widely in appearance and material, so
photographing them together to emphasize order and harmony would not have been the easiest
task. Some artists radically transformed the source material, while others treated the junk
scavenged as found objects, making few alterations to the original forms. With the exception of a
few collages, almost all the works were three dimensional. Extending his approach developed as
an architectural photographer, Drinkwater’s photographs of 66 Signs of Neon manage the
relationship between the range of objects, keeping a measured distance from them. In one
photograph, Drinkwater left the gallery, showing a view from the outside looking in (fig. 3.10).
Framed through an out-of-focus tree and the floor-to-ceiling glass walls of the building, the
photograph barely registers the particularities of the junk assemblages. Instead, Drinkwater has
emphasized the spatial relationship between gallery and objects, highlighting Purifoy’s A Breath
of Fresh Air against the bright light emanating from the curtains. A photograph featuring The
Sink, which Purifoy made with Powell and artist David Mann, further reinforces the way
Drinkwater’s skills photographing modern design supported his work for Purifoy (fig. 3.11). The
Sink is comprised of a porcelain sink, its base, and assembled wooden pieces and signage behind
it. Next to it is a simple, dark upholstered armchair, a fashionable lamp, and a large, gesturally
abstract canvas. While the canvas was most likely part of the show, the chair and lamp were
163
surely not. Rather than appearing like a strange, slightly battered anomaly, The Sink fits right in:
a spatial and linear continuity extends out from the sink to the armchair, lamp, and painting.
The photograph of The Sink, moreover, resists close consideration of the materiality of
the assemblages, in favor of showing the relationships between objects in the show. The body of
The Sink is degraded: rust stains drip down its base, and the structure behind it shows flaking,
chipped tiles, catawampus wooden boards, and a proscriptive sign about keeping the bathroom
facility clean. This materiality, for many viewers of the exhibition, was shocking.
331
The
tangibility through which Purifoy described working with the junk, however—artists were
“groping” in the “glittering, twisted, grotesquely formed materials”
332
—is, in Drinkwater’s
photograph, subsumed by the rest of the interior and its objects. The dirtiness is less noticeable
because the white of the sink reflects the pleasant, diffused white light emanating from behind
the curtain and lamp at the far right, and the bright white tiles on the sculpture’s base further
distract from the chips and stains. The photograph draws the structure behind the sink,
degradation indexed on its surface, into direct comparison with the abstract canvas beside it,
whose de rigueur, wild brushstrokes defang the disorderly tiles and peeling surfaces. As the art
historian Lisa Uddin has traced, visitor feedback often focused on the materiality of the objects
as proof of their ugliness, how the material degraded any concept of art they might espouse, and
how the artists’ distortion of the objects was even worse than the effects fires have on junk. The
public response, Uddin notes, reveals an implicit assumption that the ugliness of the sculptures
and, by association, the ugliness of Black neighborhoods, needed to be cleaned and reformed, not
331
Lisa Uddin quotes visitor feedback, which commonly expressed feeling deceived by the ugliness of the
assemblages, skepticism at junk appearing in an art gallery, and outrage at the prices on the pieces. Uddin, “And
thus not Glowing Brightly,” 318.
332
Purifoy, “The Art of Communication as a Creative Act,” 5.
164
presented in differently manipulated forms.
333
Such a reception makes Drinkwater’s photographic
portrayal all the more notable. It was through the photograph, then, where the transformation of
junk into something orderly might have been achieved, rather than through an in-person
encounter with the artwork, where the materiality distracted.
Drinkwater’s photography also highlights the shared formal investments between
architectural photography and exhibition installation photography. Exhibition installation
photography has widely permitted and shaped our study of exhibitions and objects of the late-
nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Rarely, however, is it the sole focus of
scholarship, nor have scholars given it due consideration for its importance as a common
commercial photographic assignment. Instead, exhibition photographs are considered as a
transparent view onto their subjects. A recent study about Soichi Sunami, the long-time
photographer for the Museum of Modern Art, New York who produced thousands of
photographs of exhibition installations, prioritizes his dance photography and pictorialist work
done before he was ever hired at MoMA, framing his MoMA work as the job that distracted him
from his artistic photographic pursuits.
334
Architectural photographers have been called upon to photograph exhibitions because the
approach to their subjects is similar. The art historian Mary Staniszewski, who has studied
MoMA’s exhibition design, has written in passing on the conventions of exhibition photography
at the institution. She has outlined the formal standards embraced by MoMA’s exhibition
installation photography, including photographing galleries with no viewers present and
333
Uddin, “And thus not Glowing Brightly,” 318-19.
334
David F. Martin, ed. Invocation of Beauty: The Life and Photography of Soichi Sunami (Edmonds, Washington:
Cascadia Art Museum, 2018).
165
emphasizing the clean expanses of light walls and the openness of the spaces in relation to the art
on display.
335
Indeed, exhibition photographs show galleries as spacious, organized, and
dynamic, objects placed in perfect harmony with their surrounds.
336
Both exhibition photography and architectural photography must self-efface, disguising
the photographers’ own perspective and encouraging viewers to see their representations as
transparent. As mentioned earlier, Ezra Stoller photographed the widely circulated and now
infamous Family of Man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in
1955 (fig. 3.12). His photographs were printed in the show’s exhibition catalogue and were used
for magazine advertisements for the show and exhibition reviews.
337
Stoller’s photographs give
the viewer a semblance of control over where they look in the photograph, while in reality
controlling the frame so that all of the photographs in the exhibition appear equally visible.
Despite the relatively straightforward representations, Stoller’s photographs nonetheless craft a
particular narrative: they support one reading of the show, which suggests that Family of Man
aimed to overwhelm viewers with choice, a way of implying democratic viewing practices
triumphing over authoritarian control.
338
Another example demonstrates how exhibition
installation photographs more directly altered viewers’ perception of art and design on display.
Claire Zimmerman highlights designer Charles Eames’s photographs of Mies van der Rohe’s
exhibition at MoMA in 1947 as leaving viewers “not quite certain about the spatial conditions of
335
Mary Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art
(Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1999).
336
One particular exception is Charles Ray Eames’s photography of an architectural show on Mies van der Rohe at
the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which played with the spatial conditions of the photograph. See
Zimmerman, Photographic Architecture, 303.
337
“Family of Man,” Arts & Architecture Magazine (March 1955): 22-23.
338
Fred Turner, “The Family of Man and the Politics of Attention in Cold War America,” Public Culture 24, no 1
(2012): 55-84.
166
the picture”
339
(fig. 3.13). Indeed, taken at a low angle, Eames has framed the photograph so as to
collapse the chairs in the foreground with the expansive photomurals in the middle and
background, with the visitors; we’re unsure of what is object and what is image.
Evaluating Drinkwater’s exhibition photographs leads to an understanding of how his
photographs cultivate the transformation of junk into a vision of urban order specifically through
managing the relationship between the assemblage sculptures and the news photographs on
display. Often arranged in a salon hang when exhibited, the blown-up news photographs
included a range of depictions of the uprising, taken both during and after it. The photographs
present a comprehensive sampling of the dominant ways through which newspapers portrayed
the events. Several of those included were featured prominently in the Los Angeles Times’s
coverage of the riots, and others appeared in publications such as TIME Magazine (fig. 3.14).
340
In a photograph likely taken at the exhibition’s installation at the Los Angeles Sports
Arena, what appears to be Max Neufeldt’s assemblage, Max Untitled, is placed in front of a
blown-up copy of a photograph featured in the Los Angeles Times’s post-Watts coverage (fig.
3.15). Beside the photograph is a wall-piece collage and below that is Debby Brewer’s
Sunflowers. The Times photograph is placed at the top of five planks of light-colored wood,
reminiscent of the side of a house. Max Untitled partially blocks the Times photograph.
Prioritizing the sculpture and blocking the photograph is the most obvious way that Drinkwater
visualized Purifoy’s desire for the assemblages to impose order on disorder: the news photos
seem positioned as the disorderly before, and the assemblage sculptures the after, presumably a
final step in transforming the violence and harm of the uprising.
339
Claire Zimmerman, Photographic Architecture in the Twentieth Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2014), 303.
340
Art Berman, “Eight Men Slain: Guard Moves In,” Los Angeles Times, August 14, 1965; “Los Angeles Riot,”
TIME Magazine August 20, 1965.
167
A few photographs of 66 Signs of Neon were taken by other photographers, and one of
these underscores how Drinkwater’s approach deprioritized the shocking quality of the
sculptures and the news photographs. An unattributed photograph taken at the exhibition
installation at the Watt’s Renaissance Festival from the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner
newspaper shows a different view of the same Times photograph (fig. 3.16). In it, a toddler stares
up at a woman in the photo, mouth agape. None of the assemblage sculptures are visible. The
dynamics of looking in this photo are pronounced: the toddler looks at the photo, a woman
within the Times photo seems to look back, and a face in the photograph below the toddler seems
to look up in return. This unattributed photo immobilizes these glances of recognition between
image and person, removing sculptures entirely from the relationship of visualizing the
aftereffects of the uprising. The photograph of the toddler underscores how Drinkwater’s
installation photographs, by contrast, tempered the visibility of the news photographs as well as
their immediate association with racialized relationships in Watts. They prioritize, as installation
photography often does in striving for an objective representation, the entire scene. In the case of
66 Signs of Neon, that manifested through representing the relationship between sculpture and
photography. In the Herald-Examiner photograph, the Times photograph and the disturbing
appearance of the destroyed building and street are in high relief, but so is human response. The
photographer’s proximity to the child prevents a distanced assessment of the room and the
exhibition space separated from the realities of racialized encounter with the news photograph. In
its original print form, the Times photograph illustrated an article titled “‘You’re Black and that’s
All There is To It,’” the first of a series from October 1965 that looked back at the uprising.
341
The blunt force of the article’s title, accompanied by the image of a junk pile, presented a grim
341
Jack Jones, “View From Watts: ‘You’re Black and That’s All there is To It,” Los Angeles Times, October 10,
1965.
168
view of the disenfranchisement of Black Angelenos, with no transformative solutions offered.
Unlike in the news photograph itself, in the Los Angeles Times’s coverage, and in the Herald-
Examiner photograph, Drinkwater’s own photograph seems to avoid representing the dynamic of
being Black and looking at Watts.
News photographs played a significant role in controlling how the public understood the
Watts uprising, despite the prominent role that television coverage played in the event’s coverage
and subsequent historicization. Dominant visual news media covered United States civil unrest
and uprising in singular, homogenizing ways.
342
As uprisings unfolded across the country in the
1960s, newspapers and other media similarly relied on photography to craft narratives that
situated Black and other non-White participants as out-of-control aggressors and police as either
victims of popular disorder or as ineffective agents of control.
343
Newspapers and magazines
alike used photographs of burning, trashed buildings, looting, and piles of detritus alongside
attention-grabbing headlines such as “In a Roaring Inferno ‘Burn, Baby, Burn!’” (fig. 3.17)
344
The very belief that the uprising was a disorder reinforced entrenched racist and classist attitudes
towards poor, Black neighborhoods, but it also conveyed an anxiety about the medium of
photography specifically. The spectacle of news media that spread during and after the uprising,
especially notable for the profusion of television coverage, constituted a direct threat to the
photographic representability of the city.
345
Where once photography had given form to a city
whose dominant representations had depended on the suppression of imagery of poverty and
342
Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,
1995).
343
Nicole Maurantonio, “Standing By: Police Paralysis, Race, and the 1964 Philadelphia Riot,” Journalism History
38, no. 2 (2012): 110-121; Weena Perry, “‘An Outpost of Strength’: The Los Angeles Times Performs Law and
Order versus Chaos during the Watts Rebellion of 1965,” afterimage (August/July 2005): 32-37.
344
Marc Crawford, “In a Roaring Inferno ‘Burn, Baby, Burn!,’” LIFE Magazine, August 27, 1965, 27.
345
For more on television coverage of Watts, see Elizabeth Wheeler, “More Than the Western Sky: Watts on
Television, August 1965,” Journal of Film and Video 54, no. 2/3 (2002): 11-26; Heath Schultz, “Debord in Watts:
Race and Class Antagonisms Under Spectacle,” Lateral 7, no. 1 (Spring 2018): n.p.
169
oppression in neighborhoods such as Watts, photographs of the uprising circulating widely in
newspapers and magazines threatened its capacity to do so. Photographs capturing disorder, then,
would contribute to a final collapse of the social order in the wake of the uprising. Following this
logic, photographs conveying order could support the restoration of the city. As the art historian
Weena Perry has argued, photography showing the National Guard or the LAPD in the same
frame as the material damage could retore the “orderly urban grid” to the city by showing the
military controlling the surroundings.
346
The way that news photographs depicted Watts—through scenes of derelict chaos—
served as a metonym for how urbanists and writers framed the problems of greater Los Angeles.
Los Angeles had already become a favorite topic for professionals in design, architecture, and
related fields across the United States.
347
Its sprawl, lack of centralized planning, and lenient
zoning laws made it an easy warning symbol of what could become of other U.S. cities.
Beginning in the 1940s and accelerating in the 1960s, such terms took on increased significance
with regard specifically to Los Angeles’s visual form as seen through photographs and other
media.
348
In his God’s Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America’s Landscape
(1964), architectural historian Peter Blake wrote furiously of the descent of the landscape into
disorder, ugliness, and chaos. Blake feared that people had “lost the art of seeing” and, as a
result, American cityscapes and landscapes had been destroyed by profiteers, bureaucracy, and
346
Perry, “‘An Outpost of Strength.’”
347
Exemplary are Peter Blake, God’s Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America’s Landscape (New
York: Holt, 1964) and Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1960).
348
Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch and John R. Myer, View from the Road (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964); György
Kepes, Language of Vision: Painting, Photography, Advertising-Design, (Chicago: Paul Theobald and Company,
1944); Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1960).
170
general apathy.
349
He ended the book with a plea for change, arguing that he still believed that it
would be possible to create “order in America.”
350
Like Blake, “junk” was the term around which
Purifoy articulated his thoughts regarding the 66 Signs of Neon project. In his Junk Art essay, he
wrote that “Watts finds itself virtually set down in the center of junk.” Such opinions had racial
connotations, moreover. As Lisa Uddin has shown, the reception of Purifoy’s work in non-Black
contexts reveals how white Angelenos understood “junk” and “trash” as implicitly and explicitly
associated both with urban Los Angeles and with Blackness.
351
In a later edition published in 1979, Blake reflected on a new generation of architects
who embraced, rather than detested, the effects of advertising, popular culture, and the
deregulation of architectural standards on the visual systems of American cities.
352
“Certain
photographs I included as examples,” Blake ultimately admitted, “now strike me as
extraordinarily interesting – even beautiful.”
353
Blake’s reconsideration of his book’s original
premise retroactively articulated the importance of photographs demonstrating not only the
aesthetic potential of junk, but the opportunities for rethinking the urban landscape that it
presented.
Urbanist Kevin Lynch’s canonical The Image of the City (1960) inaugurated a new
concern over cities’ formlessness and their visual appearances.
354
A city’s “image” is a
349
Blake.
350
Blake
351
Rather than situate 66 Signs of Neon as a straightforward critique of materialism or of the veneer of optimism
haunting Los Angeles, Uddin considers how the assemblages suggest new purposes for modernism’s objects:
discarded, junk objects could catalyze new ways of seeing both things and places that centered Blackness and Black
perspectives. Lisa Uddin, “And thus not Glowing Brightly,” 308-323.
352
Blake, God’s Own Junkyard, 19. Accompanying this discussion was a photograph of Claes Oldenburg’s Giant
Cigarette Butts (1976).
353
Blake, God’s Own Junkyard, 14.
354
While Lynch focused on a non-medium specific idea of images, when embarking on field research for the book
in Boston, he worked with Gyorgy Kepes to photograph the city while on foot, and produced nearly 2,000
photographs in the process. Photography, then, clearly played an important role in his theorization of the city.
Perceptual Form of the City, 1951 - 1960, 1. Kevin Lynch papers, MC-0208, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
171
conglomeration of the perceptual effect it elicited in residents, the mental image it evoked, and
the visual representations of it across visual media. City planners, Lynch believed, should work
to improve the visual structure of a city in order to improve its mental images and overall
legibility.
355
While Lynch’s study focused on Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles, the latter
served as his example of the city with the least legibility (he noted that L.A. left residents
disoriented and weary, and many described the city as formless).
356
Architectural critic Allan
Temko blamed a lack of imagination on the part of city officials: “physical ugliness, like social
despair such as produced the Watts riot, is a direct outcome of this costly failure to achieve our
full creative potential.”
357
Temko spoke on the occasion of the American Cement Corporation’s
annual symposium on the future of American cities, which attracted notable urban historians,
architects, and designers as speakers. The Corporation sponsored the production of Junk Art and
exhibited 66 Signs of Neon at its annual shareholder’s meeting in 1966, at which Purifoy was an
invited guest (fig. 3.18).
358
In the shareholder’s report, the author remarked that if collective
effort were not currently undertaken, they in the corporate world would have to witness the
Libraries, Department of Distinctive Collections. Partially digitally accessible.
https://dome.mit.edu/handle/1721.3/33656.
355
Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1960), 3.
356
Ibid, 40.
357
American Cement Corporation, “A symposium: America's private construction industry and the future American
city. 1966.” Southern California Regional Planning Collection, The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.
358
Scrapbook, 1935-1938, 1966-1997, Box 1, Folder 31, Noah Purifoy Papers, 1935-1998, bulk 1971-1998
(hereafter NPP), Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. For more on the relationship
between Purifoy’s exhibition and the American Cement Corporation, see Lisa Uddin, “And thus not Glowing
Brightly.” For more on the relationship of art and corporations in the 1960s, see Alex J. Taylor, “Rusting Giant: U.S.
Steel and the Promotional Material of Sculpture,” in Monica E. Jovanovich, Melissa Renn, eds. Corporate
Patronage of Art and Architecture in the United States, Late 19th Century to the Present (London: Bloomsbury,
2019). For more on the boom in the art market and the monetization of art in the 1960s, see Sophie Cras, The Artist
as Economist: Art and Capitalism in the 1960s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019); Diana Crane, The
Transformation of the Avant-Garde: The New York Art World, 1940–1985 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1987).
172
growth of “shapeless, aimless, non-cities.”
359
In one of its strongest condemnations, the McCone
Commission Report authors likewise homed in on how the uprising affected the very form of
Los Angeles: “What happened was an explosion – a formless, quite senseless, all but hopeless
violent protest.”
360
Under these conditions, Drinkwater attempted to reclaim visual order from the
formlessness of the uprising in a similar way to news photographers representing the uprising
itself. Borrowing from the language of all those eager to transform disorder into order, the
seemingly innocuous genres of exhibition and architectural photography could in fact stage the
ultimate resolution of the show and of the uprising. Yet the smooth facilitation of order was not
so easily applied. In another of Drinkwater’s photographs, Purifoy stands in front of a wall of
news photographs (fig. 3.19). A scrapbook that Purifoy made to document his projects
prominently displays this photograph, suggesting that the artist may have seen it as a significant
photograph for representing 66 Signs of Neon.
361
As if a docent, Purifoy appears to moderate the
photographs behind him, an arm crossed over his torso, his other mid-gesture as he faces two
white men dressed in suits. Ignoring Shulman’s advice about avoiding human figures in
architectural photographs to avoid their conspicuousness, Drinkwater instead focuses attention
on the conversation. The photograph, however, leaves us as voyeurs, just out of reach.
Drinkwater has gone further than photographing the conversation from a distance. An out-of-
focus sculpture in the foreground bisects one of the men, denying a clear line of sight to him, and
359
“A Symposium: America’s Private Construction Industry and the Future American City, Published Papers” (Los
Angeles: American Cement Corporation, 1966), Series I. Published Planning Reports 1909-2003, Southern
California Regional Planning Collection, The Huntington Library.
360
John McCone, Violence in the City - An End or a Beginning? A Report by the Governor’s Commission on the Los
Angeles Riots (Los Angeles: December 2, 1965), 4.
361
Scrapbook, 1935-1938, 1966-1997, Box 1, Folder 31, NPP.
173
disrupting the conventions of exhibition photography that privilege a clear view of the scene.
The viewer is again left wondering about the nature of this encounter and what Drinkwater is
trying to convey about the conversation catalyzed in the exhibition. The photograph does not
draw the news photographs, the visitors, and the assemblage sculptures into a harmonious
relationship; rather, it underscores the multiple perspectives, identities, and objects in the frame.
Next to Purifoy, the news photographs and the looting, destruction, and disorder that they recall
stand out, sharply in focus. In one final photograph, also taken from the perspective of a voyeur,
Drinkwater uses a sculpture in the foreground as if it is a pinhole camera (fig. 3.20). A White
woman, a friend of Purifoy’s, stares down at the base of Max Untitled. She is not the only figure
in the frame, though: at far right is another photograph taken during the uprising. A Black man
sits against a building wall, looking out at the street. He and the woman face each other across
time and space. But Drinkwater has positioned Max Untitled to block their potential encounter.
Purifoy’s goal of communication between people of all races seems impossible to visualize from
the perspective of this photograph. Photographs, then, registered the incongruities of racialized
viewing that surfaced in Watts post-uprising.
362
Drinkwater’s work provides an opportunity to reflect on the moments where photography
fails to control a scene, underscoring both the medium’s limitations and what these limitations
reveal. The presence of news photographs provokes questions about the traces of the uprising
that could not be elided through imposing visual order. Writing about the use of visual evidence
in the 1992 Rodney King trials, the next uprising that would shake Los Angeles, the photography
historian John Tagg suggests that “for the evidence of the image, there was no escaping the long
362
In the context of 1950s Notting Hill, London, Nicholas Mirzoeff similarly addresses how photography bears
witness to the uncertainty of urban racialized change. See Mirzoeff, “An Anticolonial way of Seeing,”
Interventions, 24 no. 7 (2022): 979-994.
174
trek across the more uncertain ground of the conditions of witness, the status of documentation,
and the politics of disputable meanings.”
363
What might seem like straightforward archival
documentation of the installation in fact performs a bringing together of different racial subjects,
albeit without any clear resolution of the subject positions’ relationship to power and to the
uprising. Theorist Ariella Azoulay has argued that photography can show that “the perpetrator
and the victim in a regime-made disaster do not exist in separate worlds.”
364
For Azoulay,
photography of state-sanctioned violence, as the Watts uprising could be characterized, provokes
a consideration of the power and agency of citizens and a police and state force together, rather
than separately. The installation photographs contribute, then, not because they better respond to
the uprising than the exhibition itself, but because they allow for a reflection on the racialized
power structures involved in the act of responding to urban crisis.
A central responsibility of architectural photography as a genre has been to document the
processes of planning and construction that contribute to a design’s final form; its progressive
transformation, in other words. Drinkwater’s installation photographs inadvertently capture how
processes of urban design and transformation do not always proceed in a linear direction. The
fact of Blackness and the views of Black revolt visible in traces through the news photography
and sculptures might recede to the background, as documents of a past event, but Drinkwater’s
photographs provoke us to think about how and why such visual evidence is assumed to function
as background, as squarely in the past. The photographs, it seems, cannot answer whether
Blackness was problematized or celebrated in 66 Signs of Neon. As urban uprisings spread
363
John Tagg, The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
364
Ariella Azoulay, Review of Seeing through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography, by Martin
Berger, The Art Bulletin 94, No. 3 (September 2012): 468.
175
across the country in the 1960s, Drinkwater’s photographs demonstrate that an uncertainty over
how to represent them became an implicit concern across many different genres of photography.
Junk Art and a Politics of Response
Where do Drinkwater’s photographs leave us, if ultimately their quest for order falls
short? I return to the Junk Art exhibition catalogue, for which Drinkwater claimed a good deal of
credit, and the politics around Watts that it intimates, in order to reconsider how Purifoy’s
framing of the project and of his position in Watts further complicated Drinkwater’s
assignment.
365
The aftermath of the uprising exposed the fractures between different classes of
Black Angelenos with different political orientations. Larger political and economic
transformations changed Watts over many decades leading up to the uprising, which catalyzed an
ideological fragmentation amongst Black communities in Los Angeles; older and younger
generations, as well as middle-class and low income communities, felt increasing hostility
towards one another.
366
Black nationalist activists such as Stokely Carmichael wrote of the civil
rights movements and figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., who visited Watts after the
uprising and was met with heckles, and argued that their messages were adapted to “middle-class
whites.”
367
Unlike those associated with the Black Power movement, Carmichael argued, civil
rights movements made change “in form only.”
368
One of the most notable iterations of the
cultural renaissance in Watts after the uprising, the annual Watts Summer Festival at which 66
Signs of Neon was shown several times, was also criticized for its attempt to “pacify” the angry
365
Lipschutz and Kucheck, “Modern Art in Los Angeles,” 27.
366
Joshua Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 171.
367
Horne, Fire this Time, 183.
368
Kwame Ture, Afterword, in Ture and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: the Politics of Liberation in America
(Vintage Books, 1992 [1967]), 125.
176
youth of Watts, and to avoid the urgent need for structural change in the city.
369
Imbricated in
this tense situation was Purifoy, himself no activist nor a member of any particular political
group. In an oral history interview, Purifoy remarked that he arrived as a professional in Watts
“not being quite colored.”
370
While they were acutely aware of the problems affecting Black
Angelenos in Watts, neither he nor Drinkwater lived in Watts, and Purifoy felt a sense of
alienation because of his class position as a middle-class working professional arriving in a poor
neighborhood.
371
Instead, Purifoy’s most concrete aspiration post-uprising was to advocate for
the construction of a permanent building for the Watts Towers Art Center. Indeed, he intended to
sell Junk Art to fundraise for this effort, although it is unknown how many copies he sold or how
widely it circulated.
372
Purifoy’s class position and interest in arts education begins to explain why, in his essay
“The Art of Communication as a Creative Act” in Junk Art, he turns his attention to the McCone
Commission Report (MCR), the state government’s official study of and response to the
uprising. “We thought it a good report,” he writes, “that it advocated most things necessary for
the betterment of the community.”
373
In the weeks following the August uprising, Governor
Edmund “Pat” Brown quickly created a commission to assemble a team of forty people to
conduct meetings with witnesses and assemble documentation. After sixty-four meetings they
wrote a report about the uprising over the course of three months, which was ultimately
published on December 2, 1965.
374
Described by the Chairman John A. McCone as a “tragic
disorder,” the uprising caused the Commission to further amplify the call for urban order in
369
Horne, Fire this Time, 202; For more on 66 Signs of Neon’s role in the festival, see Jones, South of Pico, 89.
370
Mason, “African-American Artists of Los Angeles,” 86.
371
Lipschutz and Kucheck, “Modern Art in Los Angeles,” 19.
372
Mason, “African-American Artists of Los Angeles,” 79.
373
Purifoy, “The Art of Communication as a Creative Act,” 6.
374
McCone, Violence in the City.
177
Watts and in greater Los Angeles.
375
The MCR included several news photographs, many of
which were also featured in 66 Signs of Neon when exhibited.
Community members, activists, and scholars immediately criticized the MCR, which
circulated in newspapers and magazines, some of which printed it alongside a compilation of
news photographs from the uprising.
376
Many of the educational and economic reforms proposed
were so expansive in scale that they were immediately understood as untenable under the current
state and federal circumstances and thus seemed disengaged from realistic reform. Second, the
report erroneously concluded that the majority of Black Angelenos disapproved of the riots, and
that those involved in rioting were “marginal” people, who did not represent the rest of the city.
Finally, the report called for an increase in law enforcement and specifically for a new focus on
crime prevention to maintain law and order. In fact, many people believed that the violence and
chaos of Watts was the only path towards radical, revolutionary change for disenfranchised,
oppressed Black communities, a sentiment that aligned with the hostility and anger with which
famous civil rights leaders were greeted in the community post-uprising.
377
Purifoy went further: 66 Signs of Neon could “establish its validity by becoming an
addition to the McCone Report.”
378
One of his goals for the exhibition was “that we all take equal
responsibility for the Wattses of the world, and that only we can prevent their happening
375
Ibid, iii. For a longer history of the term “disorder” and its use in the United States, see Michael Feldberg, The
Turbulent Era: Riot & Disorder in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
376
“Critique of the Governor's Commission on the Los Angeles Riot,” Kendall O. Price Los Angeles Riots
Collection, USC Special Collections; Robert Fogelson, “White on Black: A Critique of the McCone Commission
Report on the Los Angeles Riots,” Political Science Quarterly 82, no. 3 (1967): 337-367; Bayard Rustin,
“The Watts 'Manifesto' & the McCone Report,” in Commentary, 41 (no. 3, 1966): 33.
377
Kwame Ture, Afterword, in Ture and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: the Politics of Liberation in America
(Vintage Books, 1992 [1967]), 125. See also Guy Debord, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity
Economy,” Situationist International 10 (March 1966).
378
Purifoy, “The Art of Communication as a Creative Act,” 6.
178
again.”
379
This language in fact echoed the concluding sentiments of the MCR, in which the
commission ultimately laid the onus on Black individuals, communities, and leaders to help
themselves, thus discounting how structural oppression in Watts predetermined the form and
nature of any agency that individual people could claim. Purifoy’s main critique was that the
MCR, in its section on education, did not consider art education, which, as he remarked, was
often sidelined as “mere recreation.”
380
While it might seem strange for such explicit reference to
a municipal document to be inserted in the middle of Purifoy’s more speculative, theoretical
insights, it was a strategic invocation of the need to invest in cultural infrastructure.
Considering Drinkwater’s contributions to Junk Art through Purifoy’s words betrays how
the photographs index the political and social difficulty of being Black men responding to the
uprising. While it is unclear to what extent Drinkwater contributed to the appearance of Junk Art,
he has acknowledged playing a role in assembling it.
381
His photography is used throughout, and
the cover first reinforces the pictorial strategy embedded in his exhibition photographs (fig.
3.21). The cover features a photomontage of two photographs: the first, a sepia-toned pile of junk
that Drinkwater photographed and, in front of it and printed in darker tones, Purifoy’s sculpture
A Breath of Fresh Air cropped to appear in isolation, its base seemingly resting on the ground of
the junk pile photograph, linking the two photographs together through the perceptual trick. Junk
Art’s cover implies that Breath of Fresh Air emerged out of the junk pile in the background,
visualizing the process of transformation of the project broadly.
379
Ibid.
380
In retrospect, it is worth noting, Purifoy changed his tune, saying that the MCR did not do the situation justice,
precisely because it “actually did not know” what was going on. Mason, “African-American Artists of Los
Angeles,” 38.
381
Lipschutz and Kucheck, “Modern Art in Los Angeles,” 22.
179
Junk Art, which runs sixteen pages, intersperses photography, drawing, and design
through experimentation with layout, tonalities, and materialities. Illustrations by artists Debby
Brewer and Al Khanasa on the final pages feature lithe, curvilinear limbs bordering and
surrounding thumbnail photographs, creating the effect of a deconstructed and recomposed
contact sheet (fig. 3.22). The photographs on these pages feature portraits of sculptors, as well as
one of Drinkwater, and additional installation shots from various exhibitions, a profusion of
representations over the course of the project. Some photographs in Junk Art show the sculptures
isolated against a white backdrop, which Drinkwater shot at Purifoy’s house on La Brea Avenue,
others are installation shots. Throughout Junk Art, the photographs welcome a closer scrutiny of
the sculptures and their materials than did Drinkwater’s exhibition installation photographs.
What seem like conventional depictions of the assemblage sculptures accompanying
Purifoy’s essay take on further significance, given Purifoy’s essay’s orientation. While most of
the pieces featured in Junk Art did not attempt to represent specific places or components of the
urban landscape, Arthur Secunda’s The City (fig. 3.23), as indicated in the title that was
prominently printed beside it, brought attention to a larger, urban scale. The photograph of The
City, which occupies an entire page, resembles an aerial view of a city, neatly contained in
square, reminiscent of aerial photographs taken during the uprising (fig. 3.24). Only on close
inspection can the viewer decipher the jumbled assortment of knickknacks and objects that fit
together in compact chaos to form, nonetheless, a sensible city. The city, however, becomes
legible as such because of the isolated portrait it is afforded through Drinkwater’s photograph:
presented solo against a black background, it is given space for its built forms to be read and
processed in a controlled manner. Aerial views, however, risk compressing and abstracting the
180
complexities of human life.
382
Like the aerial photographs from the uprisings seen in
Drinkwater’s installation photographs as well as in the MCR, the unit of the city entered Junk Art
through distanced representations.
If there is order to be found in The City sculpture itself, however, it does not seem to
align with the photographic order of Drinkwater’s representations. Instead, it espouses another
kind of order, articulated in architectural critic and urban activist Jane Jacobs’s landmark The
Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). Jacobs asserts that the public is fed “simple-
minded lies about order in cities,” including that order must be disciplined or imposed on urban
areas. She argues that people must seek an experiential understanding of what constitutes urban
order, because often what appears to be chaos in the modern city is, in fact, its functional order,
the “order of life.”
383
The photograph of Secunda’s sculpture holds the different conceptions of
order in balance—on the one hand, the order of the sculpture, whose bits and bobs cohere into a
visual harmony and, on the other, the order of the photograph, which shows the sculpture in
isolation, emphasizing its rectangular shape, projecting order externally. If the imposition of
order on the various sites of a disorderly city was architectural photography’s biggest selling
point, studying Drinkwater’s photographs betrays that this order could not be totalizing, that the
“order of life” might still appear.
By hiring Drinkwater, Purifoy gained a photographer well versed in strategies that
harmonized and organized a space on display, but architectural photography was no match for
the monumental scale of change needed in both Watts and greater Los Angeles. In the 1970s, as
theorists and artists newly questioned the truisms of photography—namely, its veracity, the
authenticity of its representations, its cannibalization of its subjects—commercial photography
382
Allan Sekula, “The Instrumental Image: Steichen at War.” Artforum 14, no. 4 (December 1975): 26-34.
383
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 375.
181
especially came under fire.
384
Yet discounting commercial architectural photography does not
account for what Drinkwater’s perspective teaches us. Drinkwater fulfilled his assignment for
Purifoy: he documented the exhibition and photographed its concept. If the imposition of visual
order may have elided more intricate analyses of racialized dynamics in the show, the
photographs do valuable work, instead, by showing how 66 Signs of Neon could exist in the
difficulty and thickness of the contradictory responses and entanglements of the uprising and its
meaning to Watts. Although meant as a criticism when the writer Susan Sontag asserted in 1977
that photography is essentially an act of “non-intervention,”
385
Drinkwater’s photographs provide
a chance to consider how non-intervention could be a point of departure rather than an
unfortunate inevitability when studying how commercial photography relates to its subjects.
Black visibility, Nicole Fleetwood argues, has been historically and politically
overdetermined by certain iconic visual records that do not account for its range and complexity
of expression. By focusing on photography that espouses what she terms “non-iconicity,”
Fleetwood wishes to relieve the pressure for black visual art “to do so much,” for Black visibility
is often “that which cannot be resolved,” and representation should not be expected to resolve
it.
386
Drinkwater’s photographs are difficult because they impose an order on the 66 Signs of
Neon, an order that, in the context of post-uprising Watts, had oppressive and even carceral
implications. The photographs, moreover, do not encourage reading 66 Signs of Neon as
proposing revolutionary or radical changes in Watts as a solution. Instead, I suggest taking them
at face value: they make visible the limits of photography’s interventions in the face of major
class and race stratification. Thus, photography historian Sharon Sliwinski’s concession that
384
John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972, reis. London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2008); Susan Sontag, On
Photography (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1973).
385
Sontag, On Photography, 9.
386
Fleetwood, Troubling Vision, 9.
182
responsible looking begins when the viewer realizes the limitations of photographs’ ability to act,
or to make the public take action, articulates how commercial architectural photography
contributes in valuable ways to the writing of art history by disclosing the lessons that can be
gleaned through the medium’s limitations.
387
A New Way of Seeing?
“As always, a new way of seeing things
But what and how?”
– Noah Purifoy, “Seeing,” featured in Untitled
388
The neighborhood of Watts, including the Watts Towers, appears in only one Drinkwater
photograph, which was printed both in Junk Art and Untitled, a multi-author book of poetry
produced alongside the exhibition (fig. 3.25). In the center of this photograph is Debby Brewer’s
Sunflowers, a sculpture consisting of twenty metal, imprinted disks with hollow centers attached
to wires that stick into a plain wood plank. It is the only photograph that shows how Purifoy and
Powell first envisioned 66 Signs of Neon: as a “sculptured garden,” meant to be sited on land
next to the Watts Towers Art Center.
389
The sculpture hovers purposefully in the foreground, and
the physical ground curves upwards to a former Pacific Electric rail track that intersects and
passes behind the triangular lot that bounds the Watts Towers. The background is slightly out of
focus, but not enough to obscure recognition of the Towers in the top left corner, their presence a
prescient reminder that, before the uprising, many Angelenos knew nothing about the community
except for the Watts Towers, an enduring visual symbol in the community. Through
Drinkwater’s close proximity to Sunflowers and the rich, dark tones of the sculpture’s disks, the
387
Sharon Sliwinski, “A Painful Labour: Photography and Responsibility,” Visual Studies 19, No. 2 (2004), 159.
388
Noah Purifoy, Untitled (Los Angeles: Joined for the Arts, 1967).
389
Purifoy, “The Art of Communication as a Creative Act,” 5.
183
photograph transforms the neighborhood of Watts into a soft, lightly toned backdrop. The place
of Watts and the events of August 1965 were necessary for the creation of the sculptures, but
Purifoy expressed in Junk Art that he hoped the sculptures would transcend the conditions of
social protest to become a “feeling or sensing of something difficult to describe.”
390
As if
following this sentiment, Drinkwater, who photographed the towers on many occasions,
prioritizes the sculpture as its subject rather than its siting and surrounds.
When reprinted in Untitled as the background of Purifoy’s poem “Seeing,” however, the
photograph of Sunflowers has been cropped and cut out with jagged lines (fig. 3.26). The Watts
Towers and surrounding background has been effaced entirely by the placement of collaged
poem text. Where the Towers stood reads the following stanza, written by Purifoy:
“There were no lakes or ponds
No oceans or streams with seagulls soaring
No beach sand or sailboats
Or sunlight or blue sides
No bright buildings or broad streets.”
391
With the Watts Towers cropped from view, Untitled toppled a monument, revising the
representation of Watts. Untitled does not retain the visual integrity of the photographs in the
way that Junk Art does, instead intercepting their messages with various poems and fragmenting
the photographs through collage. As if too much to process, Watts’s visibility is subsumed into
the abstraction of the poem and the moniker of junk. The ordering effects of Drinkwater’s
photographs, then, are not absolute; they could be reduced and manipulated based on their
printed contexts. The original photograph of Brewer’s Sunflowers no longer shows sculpture in
the context of place. Because of this, it is able to support the assessment of Watts in the poem as
lacking sunlight and bright buildings—perhaps, even, as formless, to recall the McCone
390
Ibid.
391
Purifoy, Untitled.
184
Commission Report. With the help of collage, the photograph focuses entirely on the sculpture,
giving the poem rather than the image the final say on the neighborhood.
A repeated refrain in the McCone Commission Report was that Black residents,
especially recent migrants, had not been equipped for the challenges of city living; the activist
Bayard Rustin responded that it was, conversely, “cities which have been ‘totally unprepared’ to
meet the ‘conditions of Negro life.”
392
Rustin’s relocation of the blame towards cities’
insufficiencies articulates the struggle to represent the crisis of Watts implicit within 66 Signs of
Neon: whose responsibility was it to imagine a new Watts? Drinkwater’s photographs
demonstrate the consequences of applying architectural photography’s conventions: the genre
incorporated the assemblage sculptures into the visual idiom associated with modern
architecture, design, and urban study, giving it a legibility that associated it with urban reform.
This legibility seems to erase a view of the complexities of the sculptures, news photographs,
and visitors, in effect shutting out the specificity of Watts and its residents’ particular struggles in
favor of a distanced, harmonized order. Yet the photographs do not succeed in this regard: the
sculptures, news photographs, and visitors did not comply in every frame. This paradox—that
the photographs both impose order and show how order falls apart—in fact makes the case for
the medium’s importance. Photography lays bare the competing investments, ambivalent
meanings, and struggles to uplift Blackness through assemblage and exhibition in 66 Signs of
Neon.
If Purifoy suggested a “new way of seeing” as one concern of the project, Drinkwater
works through the next line’s uncertainty—“but what and how?”—at the level of the photograph.
In evoking the idea of urban order to address Black subjecthood within 66 Signs of Neon,
392
Rustin, “The Watts 'Manifesto',” 33.
185
Drinkwater demonstrates how commercial architectural photography, meant to straightforwardly
illustrate artists’ and designers’ objects, in fact exposed the very tensions of representation it was
meant to resolve. Drinkwater’s photographs challenge viewers, then, because they ask us to
accept difficulty without resolution, and to defer the promise of communication between objects
and visitors that Purifoy desired. Commercial architectural photography is instructive then
because its standard perspective reveals a fallibility of photography: that as it is sought after for
its ability to flatter, to order, and to provide clarity, its reproducible principles can reveal their
own limitations.
After 66 Signs of Neon, Drinkwater’s professional life becomes more difficult to trace.
He took on other assignments photographing for sculptors such as DeWain Valentine, but any
commercial architectural photography work he did in the 1970s and beyond is not recorded. He
dabbled in performance art, selling bottles of shredded cash on the beach in a piece called Cash
Contents in 1974.
393
He moved to Venice Beach in the 1960s and would stay there for the rest of
his life, documenting street fairs, protests, and landscapes, perhaps appreciating a different kind
of visual order in the organic chaos of its street life. In reconstructing this earlier moment in his
career, I have argued for the significance of his photographs, despite their confinement in
archives as documentation and their relegation to mere illustration. Art historians must evaluate
Black photographers through, rather than against, the professional investments and priorities that
characterized their working lives; doing so further reveals the myriad ways that such figures
shaped narratives of postwar United States art and its politics. An unassuming commercial
photographer, Harry Drinkwater nevertheless modeled a way to metabolize the immense
difficulty of recuperation after immeasurable loss. Facing this prompt remains a responsibility—
393
Harry Drinkwater photographs documenting Los Angeles art and architecture, 1950-2004, The Getty Research
Institute, Los Angeles, Accession no. 2011.R.23.
186
and burden—not only for artists and photographers but also for all citizens in search of a better
world.
187
Chapter 4—“Complaints about the Standard Product”: The Los Angeles Documentary
Project (1979-81) and Architectural Photography’s New Identity
The cover of Camera Magazine’s February 1981 issue features a color photograph by
John Humble (fig. 4.1), titled after its location: 178
th
and Manhattan Place, Torrance. Centered
in the bottom third of the frame is a small, single-story mobile home, its white façade standing
out in the direct sunlight. The house projects a variety of beige accents and textures: pale bricks
form its foundation, from which extends a modest gravel yard interspersed with small plants and
a mailbox, slightly askance. Behind the house, a mix of fog and smog further emphasizes the
desaturated colors of the house, yet it dissipates and gives way to a vivid blue sky. A
homogeneous paved road surrounds the house and its covered car port to the right. The
photograph is a mundane, unremarkable study of a prefabricated house, but nearby infrastructure
adds some interest to the scene. A network of electrical transmission towers dwarf both the
mobile home and its surrounds. Power lines extend across the sky, visualizing the networks of
infrastructure powering the city. As if emerging from the roof of the mobile home, the middle
tower appears dramatically at a ninety-degree angle to the house, integrating house with
infrastructure as one network of objects. The bright red color of Camera’s lowercase, blocky
cover title stands out against photograph’s slightly muted, washed-out color.
Camera editor Allan Porter devoted the February issue to the Los Angeles Documentary
Project (1979-81), a photography project made in conjunction with the city’s bicentennial. Los
Angeles celebrated its 200
th
anniversary in 1981.
394
City officials publicized the anniversary as
the dawn of Los Angeles’s new future, framing the city as young and inchoate, even as it
394
This anniversary marked two hundred years from when a small group of Spaniards traveled through Mexico and
first settled on Chumash and Tongva territory, naming it El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de
Porciúncula, beginning the first sustained Spanish settler colonization north of San Diego. In 1781
188
eclipsed Chicago the following year in population number to become the nation’s second most
populated city. The bicentennial celebrations served as a symbolic bookend to a decade of
widespread changes and experiments with representing the city. The 1970s in Los Angeles began
with a newly catalyzed city planning department that proposed sweeping proposals about the
city’s future; what followed were years of bureaucratic stagnancy.
The city’s official bicentennial committee sponsored many arts and cultural activities and
projects, including the Los Angeles Documentary Project (hereafter LADP), in which Humble’s
photograph was included. Organized by Humble and curator Alan Jutzi, the LADP included eight
photographers who each produced fifteen prints: Gusmano Cesaretti, Joe Deal, Robbert Flick,
Douglas Hill, Humble, Bill Owens, Susan Ressler, and Max Yavno. It was exhibited at six small
venues around Southern California and included in Camera in lieu of an exhibition catalogue,
which printed four photographs from each portfolio.
395
A publication that for decades had
showcased fine art photography, Camera furthered the LADP’s association as such.
396
With
funding from the National Endowment of the Arts as part of its photography survey grant
category, the LADP was described by Humble and Jutzi as a “survey” of the city, and their only
prompt to the invited photographers was to represent Los Angeles. With three portfolios in color
and five in black and white, the LADP included a wide variety of stylistic approaches to Los
Angeles as subject.
395
When exhibited, the LA Documentary Project was titled Year 200: New Views of Los Angeles.
396
Founded in 1922, Camera was originally a Swiss publication published in German, featuring portfolios of fine art
photography. Allan Porter became editor in January 1966. Under his leadership, the magazine positioned itself as a
pioneer of a new era of art criticism, in which “an art critic will write the history of art and photography.” A new
printing company acquired Camera in 1973 and promptly attempted to cut costs and dwindle reader interest,
switching printing methods and lowering the quality of reproductions. The company shut down production in
December 1981, just short of Camera’s sixtieth anniversary. Steve Meltzer, “Legendary Camera Magazine Rises
from the Ashes,” February 5, 2013. https://www.imaging-resource.com/news/2013/02/05/legendary-camera-
magazine-rises-from-the-
ashes#:~:text=Launched%20in%201922%20by%20Swiss,among%20art%20and%20photo%20lovers.
189
Photographers documented American suburbs, architectural sprawl, and cheap
development with increased fervor and scrutiny in the 1970s. The LADP continued this trend, but
its photographers produced photographs whose critical stance on this architecture remained
unresolved. Is Humble’s cover photograph, for instance, a criticism of the sprawl of Los Angeles
neighborhoods and the architectural mundanity of its working-class neighborhoods? Or is
Humble celebrating the marriage of architecture and infrastructure?
As the cover to Camera magazine, Humble’s photograph is a far cry from the stylish,
modernist architecture that frequently graced the covers of architectural magazines such as Arts
& Architecture. The LADP been overshadowed by more prominent and more controversial
photographic projects and exhibitions on which historians and curators have focused attention to
position the 1970s as pivotal to the rise of the institutionalization of fine art photography.
397
It
received mostly tepid or negative reviews, moreover: visitors questioned whether the diminutive
project, seemingly devoid of a coherent political or sociological premise, produced a distinctive
or valuable documentation of the city. Yet because of its minor status, the LADP engaged with
the specific problems of representation affecting Los Angeles, avoiding generalizing the city at a
time when it was increasingly prominent on a global stage. Instead of contending with broad
themes of suburbanization, real estate speculation, and land degradation that preoccupied many
photographers in the 1970s, each LADP photographer reimagines the city by taking a close look
at its component parts and local particularities—single-family homes, canyon landscapes,
downtown office buildings, streetscapes, and the police department—in a process that paralleled
397
This includes exhibitions such as Photography Into Sculpture (1970) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York,
Information (1970) at MoMA, E.J. Bellocq: Storyville Portraits (1971) at MoMA, and New Topographics:
Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape (1975) at the George Eastman House.
190
how the city planning department was likewise reorganizing the city to combat sprawl and
decentralized growth.
This chapter proposes that the LADP constitutes a reckoning with the legacies of
commercial architectural photography at a critical juncture for both the field of photography and
the field of urbanism. Increasingly institutionalized and monetized as a fine art in the 1970s,
photography simultaneously became a tool for artists who used it as a conceptual tool
categorically disparaged or discounted fine art photography (“I think photography is dead as fine
art,” artist Ed Ruscha famously noted, “its only place is in the commercial world”
398
). Magazines
that showcased fine art photography, including Camera, folded because of the dwindling print
magazine economy.
399
A widespread interest in public history and the history of the United
States catalyzed myriad popular culture projects involving photography and film.
400
Urbanists—
including Reyner Banham, Denise Scott Brown, and Robert Venturi—played outsized roles in
popularizing representations of Los Angeles that depended on a disavowal of conventions of fine
art and professional photography in favor of snapshots and photos taken out of moving cars, thus
leaving the identity of photography, and photography of the city, in flux. Because of the range of
photographs and photographers included, and because of its hybrid status as an art and
documentary project, the LADP offers an opportunity to evaluate how commercial architectural
photography is the missing component in both photography histories and urban histories of the
398
John Coplans, “Concerning ‘Various Small Fires’ an Interview with Edward Ruscha,” ArtForum 3, no. 5
(February 1965): 25.
399
Camera’s parent company stopped its operations in 1981, the same year the LADP was published in its February
issue. For more on the decline of big magazines, see Beatriz Colomina and Craig Buckley, eds., Clip, Stamp, Fold:
The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines, 196X - 197X (New York: Actar, 2010).
400
M.J. Rymsza-Pawlowska, History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s (Raleigh:
University of North Carolina Press, 2017).
191
1970s. The chapter sheds light on why photography of architecture became a hot topic for
photographers, curators, and cultural critics in the 1970s who sought to defend photography as a
viable mechanism for exposing and critiquing social problems in the country.
Los Angeles, too, was changing. A new regime of professionals working for the city
planning department began focusing their attention on reforming the city, introducing the first
comprehensive master plan in 1970, referred to as the Centers Concept. Its director, Calvin
Hamilton, focused new attention on what he called the city’s “visual environment,” and used
photography to study and compile reports on how to combat the city’s decentralization and make
the city more appealing visually, a concern he registered as equally important to the material
changes proposed in the master plan. No scholars, however, have considered the city planning
department’s use of imagery and its influence on representing the city through photography.
The LADP photographers experimented with approaches to representation and created
technically advanced, even beautiful prints of mostly unremarkable subjects. The project
intimated that for a photograph to be socially engaged, above all else its creators needed to
understand the medium by way of formal and technical expertise: how to make good prints using
cameras, lighting, and printing techniques. It did not indicate a hermetic or retrograde modernist
interest in medium specificity, however. The LADP photographers used technical proficiency
and a focus on formal and aesthetic concerns of photography as a means through which to
interrogate the popular images that dominated public conceptions of the city and propose new
ways of thinking about Los Angeles. Although purportedly a documentary project, the LADP
puts pressure on the notion that photography of architecture could continue the legacies of social
documentary photography, instead showing how architecture can be both a site of critique and
aestheticization. I argue that the LADP proposed a union between the fields of planning,
192
architecture, and fine art photography. As such, it exemplified a new direction for architectural
photography. For architectural photography to continue to be of use to urbanists, architects, and
city planners beyond the 1970s, photographers needed to embrace the benefits and challenges of
creating fine art photography.
Even as they countered the popular and “deceptive” images of LA, the LADP’s curators
chose photographers who used Los Angeles as a subject with which to experiment.
401
Through
their portfolios, we see a mutable city, whose exceptionalism is repeatedly undercut and called
into question. Through a confluence of forces coming from popular media, the city planning
department, and urban scholars, Los Angeles became burdened by its own image in new ways
during the 1970s. Architectural historian Reyner Banham blamed photography in part for
people’s shock at the physical reality of the city when first visiting: “the distant view, processed
through morality and photography, erudition and ignorance, prepares us…for almost anything
except what Los Angeles looks like in fact.”
402
Filmmaker Thom Anderson likewise remarked in
his 2004 documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself that the city was the most photographed and least
photogenic in the world.
403
While Anderson placed this blame on the medium of film, I will
show that photography had a significant impact on the city’s bifurcated relationship to its
representation and reputation. The LADP provides crucial context on how photographers
contended with the city’s beguiling identity locally and nationally. Through investigating the
nature of photography’s relationship to Los Angeles, they confirm that this relationship has been
shaped through commercial architectural photography.
401
Camera, special issue on Los Angeles Documentary Project, no.2 (February 1981).
402
Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 242.
403
Los Angeles Plays Itself, directed by Thom Andersen (2003), 2:81.
193
Photography in 1970s Los Angeles
The LADP was borne out of an initiative with larger ideological aspirations: the National
Endowment for the Arts’ Photography Survey Grant category. Humble opened the Los Angeles
Times one day and read about the city’s upcoming bicentennial celebration. He had known that
the National Endowment for the Arts was sponsoring photography exhibitions and realized the
city’s bicentennial, occurring five years after the United States’ own two-hundredth anniversary,
would provide the perfect justification for proposing a photographic survey about the city of Los
Angeles.
404
In a July 1975 amendment to the emergency jobs and unemployment assistance
Senate Bill 1695 of 1974, senator Walter Mondale proposed the American Bicentennial
Photography and Film Project (ABPFP), inspired by New Deal projects of the 1930s such as the
Farm Security Administration.
405
As indicated by its name, the ABPFP was intended to create
photographic and filmic portraits of the United States during its bicentennial celebrations and
provide employment opportunities for artists, reviving the FSA tradition; Mondale imagined that
states and cities would be left in charge of creating their own projects under the larger umbrella
of the National Endowment for the Arts.
406
The ABPFP, however, catalyzed the formation within
the NEA of a dedicated grant category for photography, called Photography Surveys, funds from
404
Humble, furthermore, was given access to several previously successful NEA photography survey grant
applications, helping him develop the language of the LA Documentary Project proposal. Interview with John
Humble, Isabel Frampton Wade, November 22, 2021.
405
M.J. Rymsza-Pawlowska writes of the collective nostalgia and interest in looking back at U.S. history—
particularly the 1930s and its fervor of civic engagement in public live—as important cultural touchstones in the
1970s. Rymsz-Pawlowska, History Comes Alive.
406
Despite being signed into law, congress ultimately delivered no funds to the project. Ultimately, the ABPFP
proposal became part of a different senate bill, not one attached to economic relief, signaling, as Mark Rice argues, a
shift from “efforts for New Deal-type government activism to the more contemporary concerns of government
support for the arts.” Mark Rice, Through the Lens of the City: NEA Photography Surveys of the 1930s (Jackson,
MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 32.
194
which supported the completion of seventy-three photography projects from 1976 until 1981,
including the LADP.
407
Humble reached out to Alan Jutzi, a curator at the Huntington Library, to co-organize the
project. With his background in grant writing, Jutzi was also involved in the recently founded
Photographic Arts Museum of Los Angeles. The NEA Photography Survey grants required a
sponsoring institution, and the Photographic Arts Museum functioned as such. Established in
1978, The Photography Museum was the result of collaboration among LA photographers,
gallerists, and curators who wished to bring “significant photographic events” to the city, and to
establish a permanent museum for fine art photography collections.
408
The project ultimately
received $15,000 from the NEA.
409
Many other NEA photography surveys interrogated cities’
demographic, social, or political realities, taking explicit stances on the issues. Unlike such
surveys, which included those of Galveston, Baltimore, and Venice, the LADP did not include a
specific sociological angle, and did not include interviews of subjects conducted by
photographers. Few of the photographs even contained human subjects.
Some of the photographers involved were better known than others. Joe Deal, for
instance, had gained critical acclaim because he was the exhibition manager of and participant in
the acclaimed New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape exhibition of 1975;
Max Yavno’s work in New York City with the Works Progress Administration and the New
York Photo League in the 1930s had earned him a reputation as a respected documentary
407
Ronald Reagan’s administration cut the NEA’s overall budget by 50 percent in 1981. In response to this, one of
the grant categories permanently removed was the Photography Survey. Thus, the final photography survey projects
were completed in 1981. Rice, Through the Lens of the City.
408
Stephen White, “Preface,” in Southern California Photography, 1900-1965 (Los Angeles: The Photography
Museum, 1980),. Two of said gallerists were G. Ray Hawkins and Steven White, whose businesses, opened in mid-
city in 1975, were the only two fine art photography galleries in Los Angeles at the time.
409
National Endowment for the Arts Annual Report (Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Arts Division
of Publications, 1980): 253.
195
photographer and chronicler of America’s city street life in New York, San Francisco, and Los
Angeles.
410
Vintage prints of Yavno’s were included in the LADP most likely to reinforce
legacies of documentary photography in the city. Other participants were known only in Los
Angeles, and many were just beginning their careers as photographers.
The LADP both reflects and contests popular constructions of Los Angeles that existed
throughout the 1970s. In Jutzi’s introduction for the project, he wrote that photographers wished
to confront “popular misconceptions” of Los Angeles, catalyzed by media and motion
pictures.
411
The project functioned, furthermore, as an opportunity for The Photography Museum
of Los Angeles to publicize itself and to craft its mission to draw attention to fine art
photography in the city. Before the first exhibition of the LADP, The Photography Museum
sponsored a show hosted at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 1980 titled
Southern California Photography, 1900-1965. The show mostly included photographers who
already had national reputations for producing fine art photography—the exhibition revealed
how these photographers had found inspiration in representing Los Angeles and the greater
region at some point in their careers. Also framing the show through the context of the city’s
approaching bicentennial, curator Suzanne Muchnic argued against those who saw L.A.’s
explosion of arts activity in the 1960s as the apex of its national artistic relevance.
412
The
bicentennial, with its implicit backwards-facing nostalgia, provided the opportunity, for Muchnic
and The Photography Museum, to mine LA’s past for examples that proved, since the turn of the
twentieth century, that photographers in Los Angeles had been producing notable art
410
Initially, Lewis Baltz was to participate in the project, but ultimately declined because of prior commitments.
Files related to Los Angeles Documentary Project, private collection of Alan Jutzi.
411
Alan Jutzi, “Year 200: New Views of Los Angeles 1981,” Camera no. 2 (February 1981): 21.
412
Suzanne Muchnic, “Introduction,” in Southern California Photography, 1900-1965 (Los Angeles: The
Photography Museum, 1980).
196
photography. Most of the exhibition’s photographs explicitly pictured Los Angeles or referenced
the city and region in their titles. For The Photography Museum, producing a history of the
region’s art photography thus meant self-consciously asserting Los Angeles as a worthy subject
of art photography.
With the LACMA show exhibited two months before the LADP’s first exhibition at
Mount Saint Mary College, it was clear that, for The Photography Museum, the latter project
extended the arguments of the former: it could stake claims for Los Angeles’s legitimacy as a
site of and subject for fine art photography. The project, however, struggled to receive sufficient
funding to support the material needs of the photographers and to secure venues to ensure a
larger circulation of the show. Other surveys had been sponsored by established museums that
could fund exhibitions and exhibition catalogues.
By 1979, two other NEA-sponsored photography surveys had been completed in
Southern California: one in Long Beach—Long Beach: A Photography Survey (1979)—and one
in Venice—Venice, California Documentary Survey Project (1978).
413
Historian Mark Rice has
argued that, when analyzed together, the Venice, Long Beach, and Los Angeles surveys produce
a “postmodern portrait” of greater Los Angeles, “emphasizing multiple perspective and
highlighting the difficulties inherent in trying to find a solid center in an increasingly decentered
world.”
414
Instead of evaluating the surveys together, I focus solely on the LADP; doing so
illuminates that the project’s concerns were more specific and grounded in the local than in the
new epoch of postmodernity, a thematic which reflected a broader tension in the NEA
Photography surveys, which were caught between the impulse to solicit hyper local
413
Both surveys included two components: curated selections of historic photographs of Venice and Long Beach
from the early twentieth century and contemporary commissioned photographic surveys.
414
Rice is here quoting geographer Ed Soja. Rice, Through the Lens of the City, 138.
197
documentations of places around the country while also assembling a collective portrait of
American life. The photographers appeared more interested in the properties of the medium of
photography than in the sociology of Los Angeles, at a time when such formal inquiry might
signal a disinterest in the problems of cities. If the LADP’s photographers were not as explicitly
sociological in their methods or approach to the city as other NEA surveys due to the project’s
lack of community interviews or other research engagement with place, they nonetheless
articulated subtler social and political changes to the city that are perceptible in the context of the
city planning department and its own relationship to photography and the city’s image.
Humble’s photograph of the mobile home was a fitting introduction to the project as
shown in Camera not only because he was co-organizer, but also because his approach
narrativizes larger themes of the project. By the late 1960s, six million Americans lived in
mobile home trailer parks.
415
These homes carried a reputation, however, of being cheap, of poor
quality, and thereby as catalysts of crowded and unsafe living conditions. City planning
departments often only allowed trailer parks to be built on the outer edges of cities, further
isolating the communities. While architectural magazines in the early 1940s featured and often
lauded new inventions in prefabricated home buildings, by the 1970s prefabricated houses of any
kind, including mobile homes, were far from popular subjects for urban critics. Humble’s
photograph, however, frames the home as if for a professional architectural photographic shoot.
The house does not appear crammed into the unpeopled frame. Although Humble used a
telephoto lens, which ends up flattening all the elements in the photograph together, the frame
does not appear cluttered. Instead, the photograph reveals how the various infrastructures and
415
Jennifer Brown and Kevin Simpson, “Mobile Home Parks Move from Mom-and-Pop to Corporate,” AP News.
September 16, 2019. https://apnews.com/article/us-news-aurora-denver-parked-half-the-american-dream-boulder-
de31aa729f514f48b934bf23ebd3f641.
198
surrounding structures relate to the house itself. The photograph is orderly, and if the house is
nondescript, it is not presented in such a way as to highlight its detrimental qualities.
Humble photographed vernacular architecture around the city for his portfolio, although
he did not think of this as architectural photography. Instead, the photographer distinguishes
what he did as creating portraits of buildings.
416
The LADP prompted Humble to change his
camera and approach to making photographs. Before, he had been working primarily with 35
millimeter black and white film and a single-lens reflex (SLR) camera. A traditional choice for
street photographers for its speed, discreetness, and ease of access, 35 mm film and SLR cameras
were rarely used by professional architectural photographers because they did not produce as
detailed negatives and the cameras had difficulty when faced with all the angles involved in
architecture: often architecture looks distorted.
417
For the LADP, Humble worked with color for the first time, and began using a 4x5 view
camera. Much more cumbersome, involving a tripod and shooting under a hood and requiring
much longer exposure times, 4x5 cameras were regularly used by professional architectural
photographers working for commercial clients. Taking up the camera radically altered Humble’s
presence as a photographer on the street: he was noticeable and remained in the same spot longer
to get his shots, often positioning himself and his tripod in highly visible locations such as on top
of his van. Thus, his process of photography, which we might assume to be as nondescript as the
banal subjects, demonstrates meticulous care for the image and the quality of print. 4x5 cameras,
416
Interview with John Humble, Isabel Frampton Wade, November 22, 2021.
417
Humble saw himself as working in the established tradition of recent street photographers, citing figures such as
Gary Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and Robert Frank as influences in his early career. Interview with John Humble,
Isabel Frampton Wade, November 22, 2021.
199
moreover, help to remove distortion when photographing buildings and infrastructure so that
perspectival lines appear straight and building sides don’t appear warped.
As city planning officials increasingly framed Los Angeles through abstract language,
planning for its future as one of an interconnected web of nodes, rapid transit, and central urban
cores (figs. 4.2 & 4.3), Humble visualizes the material realities of such interconnectedness. He
shows how infrastructure and architecture materially relate in forgotten points in the city, such as
in the Camera cover. Likewise, in 349 Rose Ave., Venice (fig. 4.4), Humble photographed a
small, fenced-in row-house and a large billboard placed in the neighboring lawn. The angle, a
familiar trope for architectural photography, dramatizes the proximity of house to billboard.
Rather than flattening them together, as if layers of a two-dimensional surface, Humble
visualizes the spaces, and prompts us to consider house and billboard as three-dimensional
realities of the city. Through his choice of subject and through replicating the laborious,
technically precise approach to photographing and printing of a commercial architectural
photographer, Humble asserts the importance of considering how thinking about the act of
photography specifically might affect our perception of the city.
The Changing Landscape of Commercial Architectural Photography
In the 1970s the field of commercial architectural photography paradoxically became
more hermetic, especially in Los Angeles.
418
Even as urbanists experimented with visual media
and collaborated with artists, architectural photographers increasingly were hired only for
conventional architecture jobs, photographing either individual architecture projects for
418
Outside of Los Angeles, certain figures pioneered new modes of collaboration with architects, curators, and
designers. Photographer Balthasar Burkhardt collaborated with curator Harald Szeeman on documenta 5 (1972,
Kassel, West Germany) on the exhibition poster and on the photographic documentation.
200
architects, corporations, or magazines.
419
Photographers such as Douglas Hill continued to make
“art” photography, but did not consider it a practice that was in critical dialogue with their
commercial work.
420
An earlier generation of architectural photographers also retired or disliked new
experimentations in architecture. Although he would continue working well into his nineties,
Shulman vocally opposed trends surrounding postmodern architecture, refusing to take jobs if he
disliked the project.
421
This had the effect of situating Shulman’s work, the most famous
architectural photographer in Los Angeles, in a particular time and style: 1940s-60s modernist,
and glamorous, architecture. Third, urbanists such as Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown,
Reyner Banham, and William Whyte began studying Los Angeles and other U.S. cities by using
film and street-level photography. For these thinkers, L.A. was the most interesting city in the
country for its decentralization and potential to model the benefits of unplanned cities.
422
Urbanists themselves photographed for their projects and studies, often shooting out the window
of their car, or on foot, or would use the work of artist-photographers such as Ed Ruscha.
423
In
419
For more on urbanists’ experimentation, see Martino Stierli, “Photographic Field Research in 1960s’ Art and
Architecture.” in Experiments: Architecture between Sciences and the Arts, Á. Moravánszkyand A. Kirchengast eds.
(Berlin: Jovis, 2011): 54–91. Several magazines, including Arts & Architecture and Architectural Forum also
stopped publication in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and architectural photography in Los Angeles lost venues
through which it circulated experimental projects.
420
Douglas Hill, Interview with author, November 2021. Photographers such as Eric de Maré similarly
differentiated their artistic practice from their commissioned work. Andrew Higgott, “Eric de Maré: between the
Functional and the Beautiful,” The Journal of Architecture 21, no. 6 (2016): 873-889.
421
Julius Shulman, “Oral history Interview with Julius Shulman,” interview by Taina Rikala de Noriega. January
12–February 3, 1990. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
422
While Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi are most well known for their study of Las Vegas, much of their
thinking about the city developed in tandem with their research on and visits to Los Angeles, which Denise Scott
Brown photographed extensively. As part of the research seminar they conducted at Yale on Las Vegas, the class
visited Los Angeles and even did a studio visit with Ed Ruscha. Anthony Fontenot characterizes the reaction against
the highly planned, modernist city as a reaction towards “non-design,” an impulse for urbanists that theoretically
resonated with laissez-faire economic arguments of the time. Fontenot, Non-Design: Architecture, Liberalism, and
the Market (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).
423
On various occasions, Ruscha has claimed he is not a photographer, that photography is dead as a fine art, and
that its only purpose is for information transmission. See A.D. Coleman, “I’m Not Really a Photographer,” in
201
this model of using photography, what became more important was a general idea of images, and
of a city’s visuality, which implied a disinterest in the stakes of medium specificity, the craft of
photography, or in what photography specifically could show architects, planners, and theorists
about a city, even as photography remained a primary source of illustrative material for
professionals’ studies.
424
These figures did not consider their image experimentations as a form
of architectural photography.
This mode of photographic and filmic investigation excluded commercial architectural
photographers in two ways. First, it moved away from the standard of carefully crafted shots that
often made a commercial architectural photography job a long, multi-day, laborious affair full of
equipment changes, assistants, and perfecting light conditions. Second, the urbanist-as-
photographer spent less time with individual buildings as subjects, instead situating each
architectural unit as part of a larger puzzle piece about the city as a whole. Gone was the careful
attention that professional architectural photographers paid to single structures, their angles, light
patterns, and constructions.
Yet the field of urbanism and architecture did not do away entirely with the carefully
crafted photograph. Acclaimed photographer Cervin Robinson, working at the time for the
London-based magazine Architectural Review, wrote an article for the Journal of Architectural
Education titled “Architectural Photography: Complaints about the Standard Product” (1975),
which summarized the state of the field of architectural photography. Robinson perceived a
Alexandra Schwartz, ed. Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages (Cambridge, MA:
The MIT Press, 2002), 8.
424
Photography curator Thomas Garver also in the 1960s contrasted fine art photography to Daniel Boorstin’s 1961
The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, arguing photography countered Boorstin’s arguments that
superficial pseudo-events, equated to images, dominated American experience. Thomas Garver, 12 Photographers
of the American Social Landscape (Waltham, MA: Poses Institute, Brandeis University, 1967).
202
general dissatisfaction with how new architecture was represented in commercial architectural
photography, especially that which circulated in magazines. It was not about architectural
photographers’ skill, he concluded, which was readily apparent in their mostly technically
advanced shots. The dissatisfaction concerned, rather, photographic skill “seemingly
misapplied.”
425
Architectural photographers, according to Robinson’s summary of frequent
complaints, did not distinguish their points of view from the architects and architectural subjects
(“they do not even have the saving grace, if it be that, of the fashion photographer’s irony”); they
only showed what made their photographs attractive, and architectural photographs printed in
magazines visualized a narrow range of architectural styles.
Robinson’s purpose, however, was not to articulate the shortcomings of so-called
“standard” architectural photography. Instead, he evaluated alternative ways of photographing
buildings that might appease dissatisfied readers and publics. Summarizing critic James Marston
Fitch, Robinson focused on the suggestion that architectural photographers should work
“honestly and responsibly…and show the bad news as well as the good.” For Robinson,
accomplishing this lay not in improving skill or breadth but, in effect, in choosing subject matter.
In other words, critics had been blaming photographers for lacking honesty in their
representations without turning attention to subject, the real problem, which would remain
unchanged even within the most “honest” photographer. Robinson identified what he calls the
“alternative” tradition to that of standard architectural photography: photographers who
photograph older buildings, vernacular architecture, or juxtapose old with new building,
interpreting the present through the past.
425
Cervin Robinson, “Architectural Photography: Complaints about the Standard Product,” Journal of Architectural
Education 29, no. 2 (1979): 10.
203
Robinson mentioned Stephen Shore’s photography as a prime example of the alternative
tradition, and includes Shore’s photo Hunley Drive, Los Angeles, 6/16/75 (fig. 4.5). A white,
single-story stucco bungalow appears flattened in front of a towering, shadowed building with an
unusual roof. The recently built Pacific Design Center dwarfs the stucco house. The stark
juxtaposition between old architectural vernacular and new, postmodern building is what
interested Robinson, and it is a juxtaposition that appears within the LADP as well, especially in
John Humble’s photographs. In 1975, Shore was commissioned by architects Denise Scott-
Brown, Steven Izenour, and Robert Venturi for an exhibition held at the Renwick Gallery, on the
occasion of America’s bicentennial, titled Signs of Life: Symbols in the American City (1976). A
landmark collaboration between architects, urbanists, and photographers, the exhibition
showcased Shore’s large-format color photography, taken across America. The show proved
controversial: it was shown in a fine arts institution and the art photography magazine Aperture
produced the catalogue, yet its curators were architects who embraced landscapes of vernacular
architecture, billboards, commercial buildings, street life, and everyday perceptual experience.
426
The confluence of professional figures, thrust into a fine art exhibition space, helps draw out the
tensions and competing investments of art photography, architectural photography, and architects
in this period. Was Shore’s commission enough to deem him an architectural photographer? Did
Robinson’s “alternative” tradition encompass photographers who took jobs for commercial
architects as well as in a fine arts context? What made these photographs more critical of their
subject matter? If photographers such as Shore or even Ruscha represented a new direction for
426
Martino Stierli has connected the exhibition to avant-garde exhibitions using immersive, photomurals in the
1920s. Stierli, Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror: The City in Theory, Photography, and Film
(Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010.) Olivier Lugon has argued that the use of large-format photography in
Signs of Life indicated a new acceptance of the format, previously associated with mass communication and the
spectacle of billboards, because they were outsiders to the stylistic and size preferences of the art photography
market. Lugon, “Before the Tableau Form Large Photographic Formats in the Exhibition Signs of Life, 1976.”
Études photographiques (2010):1-11.
204
the commercial architectural photographer, histories have not considered this transition, instead
choosing to locate them squarely within the realm of art, despite the clear commercial crossovers
of both men’s practices.
427
Writing in 1984, Abigail Solomon-Godeau remarked that fine art photography, even as it
gained new acceptance and recognition in art institutions and markets, had “engineered its own
irrelevance and triviality,” by remaining beholden to “a modernist allegiance to the autonomy,
self-referentiality, and transcendence of the work of art.”
428
Because of the elevation of the genre
by such practitioners as Shulman, commercial architectural photography and fine art
photography paradoxically shared certain principles: both upheld the importance of technically
advanced, beautiful prints and both prioritized formal exploration of their subjects as a way to
further knowledge about the medium of photography itself. Both, also, appeared retrograde or
out of step with the experimental uses of photography by conceptual artists and urbanists.
Commercial architectural photography thus represented the experimentation of decades
of the past: pictures of Case Study Houses nestled in the hills no longer carried the optimism
they did two decades earlier, for instance. Thus, neither the field of art nor of urbanism left room
for the inclusion of commercial architectural photography as a site of rigorous experimentation
for the future of the city. Architectural photography persisted as a professional field; what it
suffered was a loss in support from those thinkers most interested in vanguard changes to
architecture’s relationship to the city.
427
Ruscha’s relationship to commercial and advertising art has been explored in Jennifer Quick’s book Back to the
Drawing Board: Ed Ruscha, Art, and Design in the 1960s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022).
428
Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Photography after Art Photography,” in Photography at the Dock: Essays on
Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 123.
205
Centers Concept: The Master Plan and the Visual Environment of Los Angeles
In June 1967, Los Angeles Magazine published an article titled “Is Los Angeles About to
Become a City?” Citing rising crime, racial crises, high taxes, and suburban flight, author Myron
Roberts argued that all United States cities were in states of emergency. While other cities were
described as staid and stuck with these problems, however, commentators argued that Los
Angeles, because of its relative newness, still had a chance to reinvent itself and act as a model
for how to save cities from decentralization and depressed city centers—it was, in fact,
commonly referred to in the late 1960s as “America’s vanguard city.”
429
Amidst these conditions, Roberts identified an unexpected development in Los Angeles
that differentiated it from other cities:
If New York has chosen to meet the problem through a change in political
administrations, and Chicago through a conventional Master Plan, Los Angeles’
approach is, naturally, somewhat strange. Here no one expects a politician,
present or future, to save us; and the city’s Establishment, if it has one, lacks
either the power, the cohesion or the will to simply decide and sell the idea to the
public. Thus the task has fallen to the City Planning Department.
430
Indeed, three years earlier in 1964 the mayor had hired a new director of city planning, Calvin S.
Hamilton, to overhaul and revitalize the city both practically and ideologically. The city planning
department, for Roberts, held a responsibility to enliven the essence of community in the city,
which lacked “excitement,” and the “sense of active and vital participation.”
431
Not since the
early 1940s had the topic of planning held such a sense of importance in the city.
429
Frank Riley, “The Man Who Will Remake Our City,” Los Angeles Magazine (February 1965): n.p. Southern
California Regional Planning Collection 1909-2003, 605982. The Huntington Library.
430
Myron Roberts, “Is Los Angeles About to Become a City?” Los Angeles Magazine (June 1967): 25. Southern
California Regional Planning Collection 1909-2003, 605982. The Huntington Library.
431
Ibid.
206
Few scholars have considered the functioning of the city planning department during this
period and specifically the effects that its policies and decisions had on visual representations of
the city, and broad conceptions of the city’s image.
432
Taking a close look at the city planning’s
plans avoid for Los Angeles helps to reconcile the scale of change that affected photographers in
the city: even as city professionals focused on the entirety of the city, the master plan of the
future, the reigning preoccupation was ultimately as a much smaller scale: the single-family
home. As such, photography of individual homes in Los Angeles carried new weight, as they
became a battleground over city-wide, master planning issues.
In 1970, the department published its first ever official, comprehensive master plan for
the city, titled Concept Los Angeles: The Concept for the Los Angeles General Plan, known as
the Centers Concept, to be enacted in 1974.
433
It was the brainchild of Hamilton, who ran the
department for over twenty years until 1985. Hamilton’s arrival in Los Angeles after successful
tenures in the planning departments of both Pittsburgh and Indianapolis brought excitement to
the department, which had been described as lethargic and ineffectual.
434
Firing a large portion of
the department’s 180 employees, Hamilton began running a public relations campaign across the
major local news media.
435
The Centers Concept reimagined Los Angeles as a series of
interconnected centers, including a mix of high and low density housing, which would be
432
Vinit Mukhija addresses the Centers plan to argue that the public planning efforts to guide the shape of Los
Angeles have gone understudied. See Mukhija, “The 1970 Centers Concept Plan for Los Angeles,” in David Sloane,
ed. Planning Los Angeles (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2017).
433
Previous proposals for master plans had been drafted in the early 1940s. Master plans also existed for different
neighborhoods and infrastructures, such as the 1955 master plan for freeways. What was called the Centropolis plan
was published in 1960 and 62, and served as key precedents for the Concepts general plan enacted in 1974. David
Sloane, Planning Los Angeles (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2017).
434
John Bryan, “Los Angeles: A Paradise Lost?” Los Angeles Herald Examiner (October 10, 1967): n.p. Southern
California Regional Planning Collection 1909-2003, 605982. The Huntington Library.
435
In a Los Angeles Magazine article titled “The Man who will Remake the City,” Frank Riley wrote a long feature
on Hamilton including his biography, the sense of civic optimism that accompanied his appointment, and the
challenges facing Hamilton in his new position. Riley, “The Man Who Will Remake Our City,” Los Angeles
Magazine (February 1965): n.p. Southern California Regional Planning Collection 1909-2003, 605982. The
Huntington Library.
207
connected by transit stations.
436
In between the centers, the city proposed protecting and even
restoring single-family home areas. Evoking the language of the information era, the plan
described the city in terms of nodes, satellites, and systems.
A general plan, also referred to as a master plan, is, as defined by Hamilton’s department,
“a comprehensive guide for the development of a city that will meet the needs and desires of its
citizens.”
437
Setting the creation of a general plan for LA, meant to guide the next twenty years
of development, was a strategic first goal for Hamilton for several reasons. First, a general plan
was in fact legally required by the state of California. Although a requirement for all California
cities beginning in 1927, very few actually adopted general plans and the state did not
aggressively pursue the matter, which is why LA did not adopt one until the 1970s.
438
Second,
general plans are to city planning departments what States of the Union are to the United States
government: plans for the future that are grounded in policy but which carry symbolic
significance for the city or nation. A preliminary planning document produced by Hamilton’s
department phrased it as such: without a general plan, “the total form of the City is not entirely
clear, and there is no framework that completely interrelates all of the various elements and area
plans.”
439
Thus, overseeing a general plan gave Hamilton a creative responsibility to the city as a
whole: he would produce its future form and vision. Hamilton indeed confirmed in an interview
that he had been hired, in part, to develop a “concept” for the city.
440
436
The plan proposed 29 centers in the city of Los Angeles and 48 centers in greater Los Angeles County. Concept
Los Angeles: The Concept of the Los Angeles General Plan (Los Angeles: Department of City Planning, 1974).
437
The master plan, City of Los Angeles, September 1965, 647815. The Huntington Library.
438
Alan R. Perry, “The Local ‘General Plan’ in California,” San Diego Law Review 9, no. 1 (December 1971).
439
The master plan, City of Los Angeles, September 1965, 647815. The Huntington Library.
440
Frank Riley, “The Man Who Will Remake Our City,” Los Angeles Magazine (February 1965): n.p. Southern
California Regional Planning Collection 1909-2003, 605982. The Huntington Library.
208
In spite of the media focus on Hamilton and his power as a leader, scholars have argued
that the City Planning Department shifted its approach towards one that was “bottom up,” an
inversion of the top-down planning policies that characterized much urban planning in the mid-
twentieth century.
441
Top-down planning is exemplified in the destructive policies of urban
renewal that legally allowed entire communities and housing to be razed in cities such as New
York, Chicago, and Philadelphia.
442
Such urban renewal projects were enacted much less
comprehensively in Los Angeles. The “bottom up” approach, by contrast, manifested in
Hamilton’s department in the form of increased initiatives to involve residents in planning
decisions and to further mediate between local and citywide concerns.
443
Historian Anthony Fontenot characterizes urbanists and architects in the 1970s as arguing
for “a conception of design that embraced the full context of the built environment, including the
unruly car-based urbanism, and the unplanned conditions that were often disregarded by modern
architects.” Fontenot argues these urbanists and architects embraced the ethos of “non-design,”
in which they criticized traditions of modern architecture and urban planning, instead embracing
“common environments ruled by spontaneous order...conditions that were the result of laissez-
faire economic and urban developments.”
444
Under these conditions, the agency of city planning
441
Morrow, “The Homeowner Revolution.”
442
For more on urban renewal in the United States, see Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and
Inequality in Post-War Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Samuel Zipp, Manhattan
Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
For a Los Angeles-specific account, see Cuff, The Provisional City.
443
Hamilton assembled two advisory committees: one referred to as the “Goals Program,” an interdisciplinary group
of professionals such as politicians, anthropologists, and psychologists, and a Technological Advisory Committee.
Hamilton (Calvin S.) Papers 1959 – 1990, 605981. The Huntington Library.
444
Fontenot quotes Banham, who remarked that, in Los Angeles, “planning could even do harm.” Anthony
Fontenot, Non-Design: Architecture, Liberalism, & the Market (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
2021), 21.
209
departments remained in flux. Despite Hamilton’s interest in the city’s comprehensive image, the
reality of local politics in Los Angeles meant that protection of the single-family home prevailed.
Between the first published overviews of the General Plan in 1970 and the enactment of
the General Plan in 1974, various homeowner association advocacy groups pressured the city
planning department into removing explicit language that anticipated population growth. The
original concept stated it was designed for a population growth to 5,000,000 (already an
underestimate compared to zoning laws), whereas the 1974 pamphlet Concept Los Angeles,
which summarized the general plan, stated “population growth is not necessary for the
achievement of this Concept,” stating that whether or not the city will grow in the future is
“uncertain.”
445
The purpose of this was to block developers who wished to take advantage of
zoning laws which would allow for increased apartment building in communities. The problem,
however, is that not accounting for population growth rendered the Concept mostly obsolete.
Hamilton’s optimistic plans for the development of high-speed transit to connect the high-density
centers was overshadowed by the reigning priority of maintaining low-density, single-family
home neighborhoods unchanged, which his department perpetuated. In the Concept overview,
the first listed goal of the General Plan was stated as follows:
Preserve the low-density residential character of Los Angeles, except where
higher density Centers are encouraged; protect stable single-family residential
neighborhoods from encroachment by other types of uses; rehabilitate and/or
rebuild deteriorated single-family residential areas for the same use; help make
single-family housing available to families of all social and ethnic
categories.
446
445
Concept Los Angeles: The Concept of the Los Angeles General Plan (Los Angeles: Department of City Planning,
1974): 2. Southern California Regional Planning Collection 1909-2003, 605982. The Huntington Library.
446
Ibid.
210
The general plan was met with mixed review. Hamilton had been mired in an overblown
scandal related to his personal property ownership, and many journalists wrote skeptically of his
integrity as a bureaucrat, equating his personal identity with the general plan.
447
Many criticized
the vagueness of the rapid transit plans. Ultimately, many of Hamilton’s concepts for the city as
outlined in the General Plan were never enacted, yet as historian Vinit Mukhija has argued, the
plan rightly brought to light many of the problems affecting Los Angeles’s growth and dispersal
and established the “agency” of planning in guiding California’s futures.
448
The plan’s legacy
was further affected because the policies of what is referred to as the “slow growth” movement
came to further dominate the local politics in the city. Grassroots mobilization of citizen groups,
especially homeowner associations, who had vested interests in preserving low-density
neighborhoods and single-family home building in middle-class and wealthy parts of the city, led
to increasing power over zoning and city planning decisions.
449
Considering the city planning department’s visual culture and use of photography can
animate the way photography in the LADP intervened on the city planning department’s
approach to the city. One of the results of a more democratized, citizen-input approach was the
department’s publication The Visual Environment of Los Angeles (1971), a plan to revisit the
city’s appearance. The publication was influenced by urban planner Kevin Lynch and his
447
Hamilton had bought undeveloped land near what would become the Palmdale Airport. When it was announced
the airport would be built there, the land value appreciated, and critics claimed he knew in advance about the airport
plans and profited off of this. City council held an investigation and Hamilton was ultimately cleared, despite many
calling for his resignation. Hamilton (Calvin S.) Papers 1959 – 1990, 605981. The Huntington Library.
448
Vinit Mukhija, “The 1970 Centers Concept Plan for Los Angeles,” in David Sloane, ed. Planning Los Angeles
(New York: Taylor & Francis, 2017).
449
Greg Morrow has argued that the development of planning politics over the course of Los Angeles in the 1970s
demonstrates the “danger of equating local planning with more democratic planning.” Greg Morrow, “The
Homeowner Revolution: Democracy, Land Use and the Los Angeles Slow-Growth Movement, 1965-1992,” Ph.D.
Diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2013.
211
canonical The Image of the City (1960), and Lynch was an official advisor to Hamilton on the
study that included interviewing Angelenos about the visuals and image perceptions of their
city.
450
Lynch, a professor at MIT, began studying cities through their visual, imagistic, and
perceptual qualities in the late 1950s, producing detailed photographic studies of cities including
Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles. In preparing his manuscript, Lynch and his collaborators
also conducted interviews to convey a consensus about the city’s imagery. The Visual
Environment, intended for distribution to the public, uses Lynch’s terms for characterizing and
organizing different parts of a city: paths, edges, nodes, districts, and landmarks. Heavily
illustrated with photographs, the report prioritizes a comprehensive look at Los Angeles, which
nonetheless showcased individual architectural and infrastructural units of the city: low-rise
apartments, hillside dwelling, freeways, and other infrastructure. The report repeated refrains
similar to those used in brochures advocating for citizen-centric planning efforts in the wartime
1940s, as did headlines at the time such as “City Future at Stake; Planning is Duty of All, Expert
Declares.”
451
Certain pages of The Visual Environment overwhelm the eye with a profusion of small
illustrations: photographs did not include a full caption but instead were tagged with a number
that referred back to a text passage, encouraging readers to move rapidly between text and
image, not lingering on photographs. The first pages of the pamphlet emphasize mobility, aerial
views, and an overall view of a city without focus on detail. The sparse, orange cover of the
pamphlet (fig. 4.6) shows an elevated photograph that emphasizes the vast horizontality of the
city, with downtown LA dwarfed against the background of the hazy San Gabriel mountains.
450
The Visual Environment of Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Department of City Planning, 1971).
451
Ali Sar, “City Future at Stake; Planning is Duty of All, Expert Declares,” Van Nuys News (November 1965): n.p.
Southern California Regional Planning Collection 1909-2003, 605982. The Huntington Library.
212
The photograph flattens the entirety of communities south of downtown, dissolves rooftops and
trees into an uneven, scattered gradient. The introduction to part I extends such visuality with a
sweeping aerial photograph that shows downtown Los Angeles, and the city beyond it dissolves
into abstract, indistinct shapes punctuated by streets (fig. 4.7).
The penchant for aerial views to represent cities was not new, nor was it unpopular in
texts and exhibitions on urbanism from the period. Compare, for instance, the New York
Museum of Modern Art’s treatment of New York’s overall image in its 1967 exhibition The New
City: Architecture and Urban Renewal. On the cover is a map of the city, colored coded pink and
blue (fig. 4.8). Throughout the exhibition, large aerial photographs dominated. These
photographs heighten the abstract potential of aerial views: the camera’s lens was exactly
parallel to the ground, flattening the plane in ways that make the photographs resemble maps and
foreclosing any perspectival lines (fig. 4.9). The city’s image is thus, in multiple media, reduced
to the abstraction of mapping. The Chicago city planning department employed photography to
illustrate its comprehensive plan of 1966. They commissioned photographer Art Sinsabaugh, a
student of Henry Callahan’s at the Institute of Design, to take a series of panoramic shots of the
skyline (fig. 4.10). These horizontal photographs, which transform the lakeside buildings into
distant, dignified monuments, provided a serial way through which to take in the city's
downtown. The Visual Environment, by contrast, does not settle on one representational
approach. One of the first pages includes nine small images that emphasize movement through
the city, from photographs taken from inside a car on busy corridors, to aerial shots of the beach
(fig. 4.11). The page includes one photo focused on a singular building, which is city hall, thus
using photography to focus the eye on the icons of civic spaces. We see the ambivalence in the
213
publication—that is, the desire to visualize the city as a whole versus the need to reinforce the
role of the individual units—manifest in the photographs used.
The Master plan’s attempt to combat decentralization accounts for the significance of
urban sprawl’s effect on the city and its residents. In its organization and in the contents of its
photographs, the LADP evidences the forces of decentralization, but not by picturing vistas of
endless sprawl. I argue that its portfolios constitute their own Centers Concept and Visual
Environment; in other words, the portfolios reconstitute and reorganize Los Angeles into eight
different representations that function as discrete but connected nodes of the city.
Douglas Hill and the Single-Family Home
Douglas Hill was the only professional architectural photographer included in the LADP.
Hill established himself by cold calling photographers, first trying Julius Shulman who had no
need of an assistant, but who recommended Leland Lee, previously one of Shulman’s assistants
who then ran his own successful business. Lee took Hill on as an assistant, and Hill would
accompany Lee on shoots, setting up scenes, lights, and other equipment and, in the process,
learning how to hone his architectural photography skills.
452
By the time Humble asked him to
participate in the LADP, Hill had established his own architectural photographic practice, and
was taking a variety of jobs photographing exteriors, interiors, furniture, and other assignments
for magazines, mostly in color. He also had a prior relationship with editor Allan Porter: Camera
featured a portfolio of his color photography of vernacular commercial buildings around Los
Angeles in the May 1978 issue, even featuring his photograph of a photography supplies store on
the cover (fig. 4.12).
452
Douglas Hill, interview with author, November 2021.
214
Like the Centers Concept, the LADP photographers maintain the visual prominence of
single-family homes. In Hill’s portfolio, we meander through a range of views of homes built in
the natural landscape, on hills, and in valleys, taken from communities across Los Angeles. Hill
was interested in the relationship between the city’s foothills and the houses built within them, in
the places where nature took over amidst the city. Several of his photographs show only the
briefest traces of architecture, visible in small flashes beyond the dull, gray-green flora of the
chaparral hills and canyons.
453
The opening photograph of his Camera portfolio shows the
wooden frame of a large, two-story house (fig. 4.13). Hill shot entirely in color with a 4 x 5,
large-format camera. Taken at a slightly elevated angle above the home, the photograph of the
house’s skeleton gives way to a sweeping valley beneath. At the horizon line are the gentle
slopes of the northern low mountain range.
Hill’s photograph resembles many hillside architectural photographs taken since the late
1930s in Los Angeles. Indeed, the apocryphal first photograph that launched Julius Shulman’s
architectural photography career—his photograph of Richard Neutra’s Kun House taken in
1936—shows the multi-story home arising out of the hillside and projecting towards the deep
background of the hills (fig. 4.14). Beginning in the 1930s, hillsides in Los Angeles hosted some
of the most vanguard architectural projects in the city: hillside land was cheap because it was
unstable and susceptible to landslides and heightened earthquake damage. Architectural
photography produced the distinct glamour of hillside architecture throughout the late 1940s and
into the early 1960s, as chronicled in Chapter 2.
The most obvious difference between commercial architectural photography and Hill’s
photograph for LADP, however, is that the house is incomplete. Where we would expect to see a
453
Ibid.
215
finished house with new, landscaped plantings integrated into the overall scene, here is the
architectural skeleton of a house, roof tiles piled above the orange wooden frame. In the
foreground, Hill includes a significant strip of the unplanted, barren landscape, which serves to
further emphasize the unfinished or, rather, untouched quality of the scene. Hill experiments with
what, in particular, makes a photograph become an architectural photograph. Architectural
magazines would often print spreads in advance of a house’s completion. These construction
shots always remained a middle step in the photographic process, which remains loyal to the
finished, staged house. This transitional point, however, becomes a finality in Hill’s photograph.
Hill asks us to consider the building process as one with as much significance to the visual
appearance of LA’s hillsides as the final house. Another photograph appears to be taken from the
same viewpoint a few hundred feet east (fig. 4.15). Here, the foreground contains a bare tree
rather than a house. The network of thin white branches recalls the skeleton of the house, and the
tree is framed in the same relationship to the landscape below. From one perspective, Hill
suggests the impermanence of such hillside dwellings, easily swapping house frame with tree.
From another, the photographs, if considered as a pair, also provoke reflection on the limits of
architectural photographic subject. What changes about the meaning of the photograph when the
house disappears?
454
Put another way, how do subject and content dictate the categories of
photography and how they transmit meaning?
In another from the series showing a house under construction, Hill photographed a
hillside home from the side of a curved driveway (fig. 4.16). The sun dramatically lights the
plywood frame, and it shines orange against a particularly cloudy and dramatic sky. Again, Hill
454
Jason Hill asks related questions of John Divola’s photographs of homes demolished for LAX airport’s noise
abatement zone, giving insight into the model of the ‘before and after’ picture and how it relates to photographs of
architecture. Hill, “Noise Abatement Zone: John Divola's Photographic Fulcrum,” in Jordan Bear and Kate Palmer
Albers, Before and After Photography: Histories and Contexts (New York: Routledge, 2017).
216
has prioritized a crisp, well-framed shot that balances house against the background landscape,
the immediate surrounds, and the horizon. Properly photographing clouds, for instance, was a top
priority for photographers such as Shulman, who wrote extensively of the best techniques and
camera accessories necessary to expose clouds dramatically and clearly.
455
Yet the home under
construction seems to refuse the full satisfaction or full solicitation of desirability. In fact, two
wooden beams in the middle of the photograph form an “X,” a humorous symbol for the
subject’s ultimate dissimilarity from commercial architectural photography. In his photographs,
then, Hill mixes up the finished and unfinished, jumbling the conventions of architectural
photography. In so doing, they provide a reflection on the places where photographic convention
and architectural reality converge. They reveal, too, the sites that were provoking contentious
debate concerning hillside building in the period.
While Hill’s photographs were not sociological nor were they meant to investigate the
politics of residential density in LA’s hills, they nonetheless provide visualizations of the sites
that had become a fraught, politicized topic between the city planning department and real estate
advocacy groups. The aforementioned slow growth proponents that fought for the preservation
of single-family homes staged many battles on the topic of large development hillside building.
They used the growing environmental movement as an ally. As Morrow has stated, the
implementation of the California Environmental Quality Act became “the homeowner’s most
powerful tool.”
456
In this way, concern for the environment, well-meaning or not, became
intertwined with single-family home advocacy.
Hill’s photographs don’t forge an outright condemnation of hillside building, nor do they
disavow meticulous formal techniques characteristic of commercial architectural photography.
455
Julius Shulman, Photographing Architecture and Interiors (New York: Whitney Publications, 1962).
456
Morrow, “The Homeowner Revolution,” 2.
217
Hill, for his part, does not care to distinguish his approach between his commercial practice and
his fine art practice.
457
His photographs demonstrate the way boundaries frequently blurred
formally between commercial and fine art practices. One photograph in his portfolio is an outlier
(fig. 4.17). A one-story stucco bungalow takes up the majority of the frame, and there is no
indication of a hillside location. It is surrounded by verdant banana leaf trees, and because Hill
shot the house at an oblique angle, the curved path leads the eye directly to the characteristically
Southern Californian painted red concrete front steps and the door. Rather than assume this
photograph is an anomaly, I suggest that it reinforces the project’s commitment to relating the
seemingly unrelated places of Los Angeles together through picturing the common houses of the
city. If, in the other photographs, Hill draws out the relationship between house and landscape,
here the house generates all meaning. Placed in conversation with the unfinished hillside houses,
this photograph undercuts the importance of the hillside houses, equating the bungalow with the
sweeping view mansion. Hill applies his skills of professionally photographing architecture to an
unassuming house, suggesting its vital contribution to the city’s image. In past decades,
commercial architectural photographs served to showcase the International Style modernist
building in the city, situating Los Angeles as a tabula rasa for cosmopolitan architectural
achievements. Hill’s photographs insist on a different purpose for architectural photography:
showing no interest in projecting an image of the city as international or vanguard, his
photographs propose an image of the city defined through its most common denominator:
unremarkable, and even half-built, single-family homes.
Bill Owens and the Bonaventure
457
Douglas Hill, Interview with author, November 2021
218
Known for his expository photobook Suburbia (1973), detailing the lives of middle-class
Americans, photographer Bill Owens produced a decisively less revelatory portfolio for LADP.
Although his portfolio lacked a unity in terms of subject matter—he represented everything from
nail salons, a high-rise office, and people doing cocaine in a bathroom—it contributes an
important assertion of the visibility of photography and its materiality to the city. Owens used an
8x10 Sinar camera fitted with a polaroid film holder. Often used in fashion photography, the
large-format polaroid cameras were cumbersome to manage and rarely used to photograph in the
street. Using this camera also marked prints through their materiality and objecthood as
photographs: each polaroid was shown with its surrounding white border, on which Owens wrote
both the print’s title and signed his name.
458
In L.A. Freeway (fig. 4.18), Owens and his two assistants positioned the camera on the 3
rd
Street bridge over the 110 freeway, the main thoroughfare that cuts directly through downtown
Los Angeles. The scene is heavily shadowed and the desaturated colors of the polaroid film give
the view of the freeway and downtown buildings in the background a muted and grey
appearance. The freeway consists of a sea of cars visible at varying degrees of blur, some of their
bodies distinct and others, like the car headed south in the bottom right corner of the frame, a
distorted, white rectangular flash consumed by its speed. The camera’s lens exaggerated the
diagonal lines in the frame: the bridge’s railing swoops from bottom left to right in a dramatic
perspective, its foreground blurred, and the vertical lines of the two office buildings in the top
right appear to bend outward at top, making the buildings appear unnaturally narrow at the
bottom as if they balloon outwards at top, a common distortion that happens when photographing
458
I’m in the process of getting more info from Owens’ studio on the large-format polaroid process.
219
architecture and using a wide-angle lens, or not tilting the lens properly.
459
The subject in the
photograph that is both most clearly in focus and whose form is least distorted is the
Bonaventure hotel, the three-part mirrored building just right of center in the top of the frame.
Completed in 1976, the Bonaventure became the subject of writing in the late 1980s that
positioned the hotel as symbolic of late-capitalist cities. The largest hotel in LA, the Bonaventure
contains an entire mall and several restaurants within it, a veritable city within a city. Almost
immediately it became a site for TV and films. Geographer Edward Soja described its
architectural form as “fragmented and fragmenting,” highly organized in its layout but also a
“pastiche of superficial reflections” that “bewilder co-ordination and encourage submission
instead.”
460
Philosopher Fredric Jameson’s analysis of the Bonaventure Hotel suggests the
tension between cities and their individual architectures in the 1980s. The Bonaventure, for
Jameson, epitomizes postmodern architecture because it is a “totalizing space,” since it attempts
to function as an entire city in and of itself.
461
As a “mini” city, the Bonaventure, he argues,
dissolves into an image of itself through its entirely mirrored exterior surface, becoming a
reflection of its surrounds.
462
In this sense, a single building such as the Bonaventure witnesses
its own loss of individual architectural identity and produces a reflective image of its absorption
into the alluring possibilities the “postmodern” city. Soja’s emphasis on the Bonaventure’s
fragmentation and superficiality and Jameson’s description of how it dissolves into an image
459
These are compositional mistakes described at length by Julius Shulman, for example, in his writing on the
technique of architectural photography. Shulman, Photographing Architecture and Interiors.
460
Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso,
1989): 243-44.
461
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press,
1989).
462
Jameson notably argues that the postmodern public’s appetite is no longer for architecture but for photography,
and for buildings that have been constructed with their image in photographs in mind. Ibid.
220
both suggest that the building’s architecture is highly imagistic, but in a non-medium specific
sense.
Soja was part of what is referred to as the Los Angeles School of Urbanism, a group of
scholars who studied Los Angeles as a lens through which to theorize urbanism in a broad sense,
and were influenced by the writings of philosophers including Jameson. Los Angeles, they
argued, modeled many trends of what they considered a postmodern urbanism: a centerless,
dispersed city marked by deep economic divisions and increasing prevalence of global
economies on local labor forces.
463
Many of its writers homed in on the disconnect between Los
Angeles’s public “image,” and how it was this image that detrimentally disguised the harsh
realities of the city. Theorist Michael Dear wrote of the “glossy, utopian images” of the
“corporate glitter of a downtown citadel” that distract from the “cityscape more reminiscent of a
Third World nation.”
464
For scholars such as Dear, Jameson, and Soja, the Bonaventure becomes
a singular symbol of Los Angeles as a whole, and serves their overall purposes of associating
Los Angeles as a city of reflective, superficial images.
Owens, by contrast, frames the Bonaventure explicitly through photography: we cannot
consider the content without the material frame of the polaroid film, and we cannot consider the
meaning of it to greater Los Angeles without considering photography’s role in this relationship.
The Bonaventure is clearly distinguished from the sky and its surrounds: because of the
photographer’s distance from it, its surface appears glossy but not entirely reflective. In other
words, its physical form is emphasized rather than its dissolving, imagistic surface. L.A. Freeway
uses photography to reveal the building’s material presence and asks us to consider its built form
463
Michael Dear and Steven Flusty, “Postmodern Urbanism,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers
88, no. 1 (1998): 50-72.
464
Michael Dear, ed. “Preface,” in Rethinking Los Angeles (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996), x.
221
and its influence on downtown cityscape away from theoretical language about how it turns the
city into abstract, superficial images.
Missing from the Camera issue was the diversity of subjects and variabilities of
architecture, the city, and its residents captured in Owens’ fifteen shots. Indeed, L.A. Freeway
was not included in the issue. The presentation of his photos, moreover, was compromised
because the polaroid frame was not included in any of the four photographs printed. Owens’
portfolio in the issue included two close-up shots of someone’s acrylic nails being painted, red
lines being drawn onto costume eyeballs, a shot of women doing their makeup and doing cocaine
in a bathroom, and an empty room with a black square painting on the wall. None of the shots
included any visible place recognized as Los Angeles, confirming Owens’ description of his
project as wanting to show the city “from the inside-out (not the tourist view).”
465
Owens, like
the other photographers in the LADP, wished to confront popular images of the city through a
distinctly photographic perspective. Owens’ photography portfolio reasserts the important
relationship between photography and architecture—even postmodern architecture. Despite
photography’s obvious ability to produce distortions and unrealities, as evinced even in the L.A.
Freeway frame and the way the freeway and other buildings appear, the medium remains
essential to accurately depicting the way architecture affects the cityscape.
Susan Ressler and Corporate Power
Like Owens’s polaroid, many of the LADP photographs focused on the interiors and
exteriors of downtown Los Angeles. The downtown business district, referred to by planners as
the city’s central core, looked radically different by the 1970s thanks to the massive urban
redevelopment project focused on Bunker Hill and begun in 1959, which was one of the oldest
465
Bill Owens, project description, in Camera 2 (February 1981): 42.
222
parts of the city. Part of a larger scheme to publicize a renewal of downtown Los Angeles by real
estate lobbyists, the redevelopment project was meant to encourage businesses and residents to
move into the area. Known for its horizontality, however, the city of LA posed a challenge to
lobbyists as well as city planners attempting to integrate the idea of vertical building in
downtown and in other concentrated, high-density corridors into the visuality of the city. The
Visual Environment pamphlet, for instance, highlighted “tall buildings” as a problem as well as
an opportunity, citing how they blocked views and obstructed single-family homes as their
problems, and arguing that they nonetheless presented an opportunity because they could “clarify
the form of the City.”
466
The efforts to revitalize downtown coincided with the rise of economic
power concentrated in the city, which Susanna Newbury has recently characterized as such:
“Backed by private capital, secured by corporate multinationals and sleek cultural institutions,
the 1969 vision of LA’s urban future sought to rewrite the city’s identity, speculatively, as one of
streamlined global power.”
467
Corporate interests and the city planning department, then, had a
vested interest in positioning downtown L.A. as a symbol of corporate power in the region.
The LADP, however, displays an ambivalence towards downtown and the structures of
power it intimated. For the LADP, Susan Ressler departs from the visuality of towering buildings
by photographing the interiors of corporate offices, many of which were located in downtown
L.A., but others of which were scattered throughout the county. Titled based on the company
office depicted, Ressler’s black and white photographs show mostly empty rooms. Her portfolio
uses the mechanisms of architectural photography to show the disconnect between the companies
and the genre of photography most used by these kinds of companies to showcase their brands
466
The Visual Environment of Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Department of City Planning, 1971), 59.
467
Susanna Phillips Newbury, The Speculative City: Art, Real Estate, and the Making of Global Los Angeles
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021),
223
and their products. Ressler turns the medium back on itself: we see how architectural
photography can be used to interrogate its own clients.
Ressler’s photograph titled Architectural Digest (fig. 4.19) shows the interior of the
architectural magazine’s Los Angeles offices. The frame is crowded with objects that all appear
slightly askance because they lean slightly to the left. Possibly shot with a wide-angle lens,
Ressler’s photograph shows a scene that seems ready to collapse into itself in the back left
corner, as two framed, abstract prints seem to lean towards each other. A striped black couch
advances towards the foreground, abutted by a dense, black section of the wall that holds a
drinking fountain. As with several of her fifteen photographs, this photograph shows what we
might think of as insignificant places in an office: this space, for instance, seems to be a waiting
room or lounge. The scene is disconnected from any of the magazine functions that take place in
its space. This particular photograph takes on additional significance because the offices house
the production of a magazine that itself traffics in architectural photography.
With a circulation of 300,000 in 1980, the then Los Angeles-based Architectural Digest:
The International Magazine of Interior Design had elevated its reputation to be known as one of
the most elite shelter magazines both nationally and internationally.
468
The son of its original
editor, who took over in 1965, aimed to shed the magazine’s regional association and increase its
glamorous status and readership. It also began featuring its first projects in both New York and
in Paris, further disassociating itself from California. Ressler’s representation of the AD room
likewise lacks any visible connection to a particular place. Her choice to photograph in black and
white struck a pointed note of difference with contemporaneous architectural photography
468
Alan Nourie and Barbara Nourie, “Architectural Digest,” in American Mass-Market Magazines (New York:
Greenwood Press, 1990): 27.
224
printed in major architecture and design magazines, which, for the most part by 1980, was shot
in color.
Ressler, furthermore, breaks many compositional rules of “standard” commercial
architectural photography, leaving viewers to wonder how this room relates to or embodies the
publication headquartered within it. Ressler turns inward on the business of the magazine, but the
photograph does not give insight into the publication, or its role in circulating and promoting
architectural photography. Instead, this interior looks like all the other interiors featured in her
portfolio for the LADP. Compare Ressler’s photograph to a cover photograph of AD by
photographer Charles S. White from the next year, 1980 (fig. 4.20). The May issue cover
featured an ornate, gilded table and matching mirror next to an upholstered wooden chair, against
a plain beige wall and deep brown floor. Taken at a slight oblique angle, the photograph is filled
with objects but presents them in an orderly manner, inviting viewers to imagine themselves
sitting in the welcoming chair, angled perpendicularly to the camera. The mirror reflects two
earth-toned surfaces from presumably behind the camera, complementing the dark floor as well
as the lighter wall. The muted tones direct the eye to the drama of the gold and the small
highlight of light pink of the vases on display. White has insured that all the objects shown work
in tandem with one another, creating volumes that complement to create a subdued scene with
bursts of excitement. The photograph was taken from far enough away as to provide a studied
distance.
Ressler’s scene, by contrast, moves in too close: we’re crowded in with the couch,
drinking fountain, coffee table, and standing cigarette tray. Like Douglas Hill’s portfolio,
Ressler’s photograph provokes a reflection on what makes an image an architectural photograph;
her focus lies especially in the acts of composition and framing. Take, for instance, the two
225
framed prints hanging near the corner of the room. With their glossy surfaces, the prints as well
as the round, reflective coffee table at bottom left might have provided partial reflections of the
rest of the room, a compositional trick that would use the reflection to fill in the space and the
composition using what was behind the camera. This effect occurs on the Architectural Digest
cover: the gilt mirror reflects two walls, whose earth tones complement the color of the floor and
chair in the scene. Instead, in Ressler’s AD photograph, the surfaces reflect back inwardly: the
coffee table captures a sharp ‘V’ of the frame corner, and the two frames awkwardly reflect each
other, furthering the effect of a room folding centrifugally into itself. So, too, does the shiny
backsplash of the drinking fountain appear to recess into its concave surface. The photograph
provides fragments of what could have been, how the photograph could have been taken
differently and been composed properly. The physical, embodied spaces that fund architectural
photographs are on display, but they fold under the conventions of representation that they help
produce, and we are still not given access to the people who produce them.
Joe Deal and Social Critique through Photography
Joe Deal was the only photographer to participate in both the Long Beach and Los
Angeles NEA photography surveys. As such, his portfolio offers an opportunity to consider
questions regarding photography’s meanings across the three projects. It also offers an
opportunity to contrast the LADP with its much more famous counterpart, the exhibition, New
Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape (1975), of which Deal was also a part.
The loaded meaning behind landscape and architectural photography in the 1970s appeared most
notably in curator William Jenkins’ modest show held at the George Eastman House in
Rochester, New York, which was retrospectively elevated as a watershed moment in the history
of photography. Originally planned as an historical-to-contemporary survey of architectural
226
photography, New Topographics changed course because Jenkins needed to plan the exhibition
quickly, thus making it a smaller show focused only on contemporary photography of the more
expansive theme of landscape. Soon after the show’s run, its catalogue was distributed in
universities and reached photography students in BFA and MFA programs, and by the early
1980s, critics were situating it as changing the direction of landscape photography.
469
As Emilia
Mickevicius has noted, several photography surveys reinforced the exhibitions position as an
arbiter of stylistic investment and aesthetics in 1970s photography. Surveys of American
photography, Mickevicius reminds us, have relied on New Topographics as paradigmatic of the
aesthetic, stylistic investments, and meaning of art photography in the 1970s.
470
John Rohrbach
has argued that the show proved so influential because it “visually summarized the beginnings of
America’s shift from an urban-industrial culture to a service-oriented economy defined by
suburban warehouses and standardized tract house neighborhoods spreading out, especially
across the West.”
471
Although the shift away from architectural photography as the show’s focus
was mostly logistical, it also signaled a growing disconnect between artists photographing
architecture and architectural photography made for commercial purposes.
Deal’s Long Beach and LADP portfolios share certain similarities: both are primarily
focused on the built environment, both are black and white, silver gelatin prints, and the majority
are taken from Deal’s preferred high-angle viewpoint. While one from Long Beach shows an
open boulevard (fig. 4.21) and one from LADP a lane of shadows (fig. 4.22), for instance, both
469
Deborah Bright, “Mother Nature and Marlboro Men;” Thomas F. Barrow, Reading into Photography: Selected
Essays, 1959-1980 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982).
470
Emilia Mickevicius, “New Topographics and the Reinvention of American Landscape Photography, 1975,”
(Ph.D. Diss. Brown University, 2019), 25.
471
Greg Foster-Rice and John Rohrbach, eds., Reframing the New Topographics (Chicago: Center for American
Places at Columbia College Chicago, 2010), XIV.
227
produce one-point perspective lines that seem to tilt towards viewers and dominate the frame.
Whereas Deal’s photographs in Long Beach are taken at random spots throughout the city, for
the LADP he photographed in the community of Diamond Bar, CA., a planned community and
city approximately thirty miles east of downtown Los Angeles, but still within L.A. County. The
Long Beach photographs show a range of structures, including high-rise buildings, a landscape
of oil rigs, parking lots, and seascapes. Deal photographed many of his subjects from the tops of
buildings over ten stories tall, producing dizzying, sometimes dramatic views even as he cuts off
horizon lines and truncates buildings unexpectedly.
The photos for the LADP of Diamond Bar, by contrast, are self-contained and show only
the houses, their back yards (fig. 4.23), and occasionally swimming pools. There is a uniformity
to them and their perspective that is not present in the Long Beach photographs, with their
diversity of sites, architectures, and urban vistas. Diamond Bar’s architectural homogeneity,
then, changes the effect of Deal’s high angle shots, heightening the sense of surveillance of the
formal decision. The subject matter further dictates the effect of the photographs through Deal’s
choice of titles. All of the photographs are named either as “back yard,” “occupied house,”
“house,” or “recently occupied house.” As such, Deal categorizes his photographs through the
most straightforward descriptors of real estate.
In the context of New Topographics, for which he photographed a community in
Albuquerque, New Mexico, Deal was contributing to a growing body of photography intent on
visualizing suburbia and its relationship to landscape. A central tension in New Topographics
revolved around whether, and how, the photographs generated a critique of their subjects.
Scholars have, in contradictory analyses, attributed the critical nature of participants’
photographs both to the subject matter and also to the formal decisions made by the
228
photographers. Deal’s work exemplifies this. Finis Dunaway, for instance, attributes Deal’s
criticality not to his choice of subject matter but, instead, to minute formal decisions made at the
level of the picture. Comparing Deal’s work to Robert Adams’s photography that prioritized an
ecological critique of land development, he argued that Deal’s “elevated perspective” is what
produced a similar message to Adams’s, one that concerned “the fragmenting effects of
sprawl.”
472
Gwen Marsh and Jane K. Bledsoe, by contrast, have remarked that Deal’s
photography is an investigation into “pure subject matter,” that the details in his photographs
expose the cultural investigations he undertakes.
473
Britt Salvesen has connected the New Topographics photography of architecture to
contemporaneous commercial real estate photography, closely analyzing how the former,
especially Henry Wessel’s photography, subverted formal conventions of the latter.
474
New
Topographics, and secondary scholarship, have established a relationship between photography
and the built environment more generally that has been mis-characterized as “uniformly
critical.”
475
This perspective has encouraged the exclusion of commercial architectural
photography from consideration alongside and through fine art photography’s exploration of
architecture. It suggests that the NT photographers’ stylistic and compositional experiments
expressed a uniform criticality towards architecture pictured. This, however, leads to an
472
Finis Dunaway, “Beyond Wilderness: Robert Adams, New Topographics, and the Aesthetics of Ecological
Citizenship,” in Reframing New Topographics, eds. Greg Foster-Rice, John Rohrbach (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2010), 29.
473
Glenn, Constance W. and Jane K. Bledsoe, eds. Long Beach: A Photography Survey (Long Beach: The Art
Museum and Galleries, California State University, Long Beach, 1980), 9.
474
Salvesen refers specifically to photographs taken for real estate company’s pamphlets and advertising, which was
often taken by real estate agents rather than professional architectural photographers. Thus, her analysis considers a
different kind of commercial genre than the architectural photography that concerns my dissertation. Britt Salvesen,
“’Real Estate Opportunities’: Commercial Photography as Conceptual Source in New Topographics, in Greg Foster-
Rice, John Rohrbach, eds. Reframing the New Topographics (Chicago: Columbia Chicago Press, 2013), 71-85.
475
Mickevicius, “New Topographics,” 24.
229
assumption that more conventional representational paradigms are inherently supportive of the
architecture pictured. It establishes commercial architectural photography as uncritical of its
subjects, regardless of its context, and thus as the inherent counterpoint to the more ethically
invested explorations of fine art photography that seek to expose the detrimental effects of real
estate speculation on the built environment.
476
Reflecting on his formal decisions, Deal has remarked that he aimed to take away some
of his control in framing and formal decisions: “I felt strongly that what I was doing was
foregrounding content, not formal elements.” He continued: “It’s not just architectural detail
that’s going to show, it’s going to be the entire context of these houses…The landscape would
become more important than the architecture, which is the thing I was trying to find a way to do,
which is hard to do when you are standing on the ground.”
477
Deal’s remarks convey a desire to
use form in order to paradoxically cede control to content, undoing any direct relationship
between composition and critique. In the context of his portfolio for the LADP, this form/content
relationship gains more clarity. In his description for Camera, he wrote that Diamond Bar had
“no apparent plan, history, or evidence of regional influences from older neighboring
communities. Diamond Bar has, almost all at once, been carved out of the hillsides surrounding
an intersection of two major freeways.”
478
476
This could be connected to a tendency in the historiography of American modernist photography, wherein
aesthetic decisions allowed critics and photographers to claim certain work as more morally invested than others,
often retroactively. Allan Sekula makes this point concerning Edward Steichen’s World War I aerial photographs,
which have been positioned as a point of rupture signaling the end of pictorialism and a transition into the more
morally invested interrogations of modernist photography, in spite of fact that the aerial photographs were applied
photos used for war, their visual abstraction incidental. Sekula, “The Instrumental Image: Steichen at War.”
Artforum 14, no. 4 (December 1975): 26-34.
477
Joe Deal, Postmodernism Interview (unpublished), Joe Deal Papers, AG 229, Center for Creative Photography,
University of Arizona.
478
Joe Deal, Camera Magazine 2 (February 1981): 22
230
Deal did not position himself as a socially engaged photographer, however. “I’m not
going to overtly make you say, ‘oh, how awful, all these houses look the same.’...I think there’s a
relationship that’s being ascribed rather than a one-sided condemnation of developers.”
479
Whereas in the context of New Topographics, Deal’s photographs were read as more critical, in
the LADP they embrace the proper ambivalence toward subject, formal framing, and meaning,
perhaps what led critic James Hugunin to remark that they “don’t tell me anything more than I
already know.”
480
Deal’s portfolio contributes to the LADP an attentive consideration of the
back-and-forth between form and content as a central tension in photographing architecture
through larger contexts of neighborhoods, developments, and outer regions of a city and county.
By transporting us to what those in the City Planning Department would consider an “edge” of
the region, Deal brings peripheral issues centripetally back to the center of the city, using the
eastern community as a test subject for broad questions about how form or content dictate
photographic meaning.
The Graveyard of Documentary
In her review of the LADP for the Los Angeles Times, critic Suzanne Muchnic framed the
project as such: “eight photographers set out in search of the city. What did they find? Real
estate.”
481
Building on similar disappointment, in Obscura magazine, James Hugunin
complained specifically that Douglas Hill’s photographs too closely resembled commercial
architectural photography: “these images don’t go beyond the rhetoric expected of that type of
photograph.” He commented that Hill’s L.A. was quite “middle class,” not showing any
working-class or lower-class housing, and his “images of nice homes perched above the crowded
479
Ibid.
480
Hugunin, “The Monads have no Windows.”
481
Suzanne Muchnic, “Search for ‘Real’ L.A. Continues,” Los Angeles Times February 26, 1981.
231
valley floors merely reenforces the ‘house beautiful’ perception of the L.A. scene.” “As formally
nice as they are,” he continued, “they say nothing to me, except possibly arouse some nostalgia
in me, or a desire to own the house. The homes become commodities, real estate opportunities
that one covets, the opposite of Ruscha’s real estate.”
482
The line of criticism points to Hill’s
meticulous formal decisions—his careful framing, his timing of light conditions to perfectly
highlight houses, his balanced color palette—as justification for the critic to avoid any
consideration of potential reflection on the conditions of architecture and landscape. Their
similarity to commercial architectural photography meant, for Hugunin, that they serviced real
estate, which he equates to the idea of architecture as a whole.
Indeed, critics of LADP argued that photographers focused too heavily on white, middle-
class neighborhoods. “No doubt about it,” Muchnic continued, “real estate is a preoccupation of
Southern Californians and man-made structures say a great deal about the people who built them,
but buildings cannot comprise the entire essence of a city.” For Muchnic, the photographs
showed a hermetic view of the city, and even those portfolios that hinted towards a larger
critique of capital, such as Susan Ressler’s, fell short of driving any salient political critique
home. Most scathingly, Hugunin wrote that the show was not politically neutral, that its critique
“resides on a superficial level, certainly not getting at the real problems confronting us here. In
not going beyond an ironic look at the visual blight to be found here, and in any large city.”
483
The tenor of criticism on LADP homed in on the project’s claims to be a “documentary”
project. The disappointment laid not only in the choice of subject matter but also in the way the
photographers included had approached the subject, estheticizing scenes rather than scrutinizing
482
James Hugunin, “The Monads have no Windows: A Dialogue,” Obscura, 1, no. 5 (May-June 1981): 19-23.
Hugunin here references Ed Ruscha’s artist book, Real Estate Opportunities (1970), in which Ruscha photographed
vacant sites for sale in LA.
483
Ibid. .
232
them. Photographs of architecture, often devoid of human presence, posed a challenge to critics,
because there existed significant disagreements about how to photograph built structures
critically.
484
Yet there was no gold standard for critical, socially concerned photography in Los
Angeles, because no such community of socially or politically like-minded photographers had
ever coalesced in the city. On a theoretical level, critic Allan Sekula remarked that Los Angeles
is a “graveyard” for documentary photography. Sekula argued that American social documentary
photography has been defined through only certain types of urbanism—namely the “vertical
tenements” of New York. He listed thirteen reasons why social documentary is “impossible” in
the city, and his first reason concerned the history of the city’s boosterism and publicized
exceptionalism. Caught between booster rhetoric—this city is a great model for the future—and
dystopian rhetoric—the fear that every city could become this mess—Los Angeles could never
settle into realism for Sekula; it always tends towards the “fantastic.”
485
The closest that
photography got to being documentary in 1970s Los Angeles, Sekula concluded, is a sort of
“zombie realism.” In such a situation, one wonders where to go. If the realism cannot be
recuperated, and an honest critique seems beyond reach in the city, how could the LADP
photographers contribute to reimagining the city?
Plans also changed over the course of the LADP’s production, shifting the focus away
both from a more explicitly political angle and from a direct focus on representing buildings. The
Camera catalogue featured brief biographical entries on the photographers followed by a few
484
Britt Salvesen makes a similar argument about New Topographics, arguing that there was so much formal and
compositional variety in the show because few precedents existed concerning how to represent new kinds of
architecture. Salvesen, “’Real Estate Opportunities’: Commercial Photography as Conceptual Source in New
Topographics, in Greg Foster-Rice, John Rohrbach, eds. Reframing the New Topographics (Chicago: Columbia
Chicago Press, 2013), 71-85.
485
Allan Sekula, “Los Angeles: Graveyard of Documentary,” in Ed Dimendberg, ed. Facing the Music:
Documenting Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Redevelopment of Downtown Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Getty
Publications, 2015), 171-182.
233
words by each photographer on what they shot for the project. In photographer Robbert Flick’s
case, the biographical entry mentioned that Flick planned to “document the ways in which the
influx of islands of high-rise municipal buildings has altered the topography of the community of
Inglewood.”
486
Instead, Flick produced eight prints that each included one hundred thumbnail
studies of different communities, creating the effect of large contact sheets (fig. 4.24). Shot
sequentially, Flick’s contribution resonated with the repetitive photography of Sunset and
Hollywood Boulevards done by Ruscha in the 1960s and 70s, shot from the back of his pickup
truck. While some of Flick’s prints include small details of houses and apartments, the overall
effect is one of repetition, movement, and fleeting images, a large departure from both his plans
and from the other portfolios in the project. Flick’s portfolio was well received by the show’s
reviewers, with one review highlighting specifically how, if “living in Los Angeles is like
watching a movie,” then Flick’s photographs examine the film “frame-by-frame, allowing the
viewer of L.A.’s social reality to really study the phenomenon of perceiving their
environment.”
487
From one perspective, the LADP concerned local issues: as I have shown, a large
component of the project concerned the representation of single-family homes, the reality of
slow-growth politics, and the emptiness and sterility preserved by refusing high-density building.
Its visual dialogues with ongoing issues in city planning demonstrated how larger debates in
urbanism—those concerning bottom-up planning, embracing the chaos of urban city life, and
democratizing cities—manifested realistically. But by digging into local case studies without
much of an agenda besides representing Los Angeles, the LADP photographers contended with
the expectations and challenges of a documentary photography project in the 1970s. Its portfolios
486
Robbert Flick, Camera Magazine 2 (February 1981): 39.
487
Hugunin, “The Monads have no Windows,” 20.
234
constituted a refusal to give viewers not just what they wanted to see of the city, but also any
straightforward social message or aesthetic meaning of the photography project. The LADP
questioned how photography related to social critique by using Los Angeles as a subject. Figures
such as Allan Sekula, Cervin Robinson, and curator William Jennings were ultimately
questioning whether photography could ameliorate or merely reify social problems, and figuring
urban place through photographs of architecture became a crucial means for working through
this.
Conclusion: Outliers Brought In
This chapter showed that the often-rehearsed history of photography’s conflicted status in
the 1970s depends on certain convergences between fine art photography and commercial
photography of architecture in Los Angeles. Commercial architectural photography lost its status
as the de rigueur choice for representing vanguard urban architectural projects, but certain fine
art photographers adapted its formal techniques and extended the genre’s legacy in new
directions. The LADP stood as a hybrid object: the last dying breaths of architectural
photography’s potential to make people see urban architecture differently combined with the
desire of fine art photographers to make, as John Humble phrased it, beautiful prints of not-so-
beautiful subjects.
488
Cervin Robinson ended his article on standard architectural photography with uncertainty
about whether he believed even the alternative tradition of architectural photography had the
capacity for self-reflection on and creative authority over its subjects. He concluded that
“perhaps we must even acknowledge that what a photograph can show us is not really how
something looks but only how, under certain circumstances, it photographs.”
489
The LADP
488
Interview with John Humble, Isabel Frampton Wade, November 22, 2021.
489
Cervin Robinson, “Architectural Photography,” 10.
235
produced, I contend, an alternate purpose of commercial architectural photography. It exposed
the futility of a model of social concern through photography that Robinson had desired, and
suggested that perhaps a photograph should ultimately focus on the local, and help us see our
neighborhoods differently. In so doing, it makes the case that photography specifically can teach
us about the city in ways other visual media cannot.
In a project so steadfastly focused on seeing the city through its architecture, why include
a portfolio of portraits? Gusmano Cesaretti’s black-and-white photographs, included in the
middle of the Camera special issue, depict close-ups of drills and police cadets in the Los
Angeles Police Department’s cadet training program (fig. 4.25). Like Deal’s photographs that
extend to the far reaches of the region, Cesaretti’s photographs seem perched on the edge of
relevance to the rest of the portfolios in LADP. While his photos intimate a certain leftist visual
scrutiny of state power and past LAPD misconduct, the photographs are, at their most basic,
portraits of members of a municipal department, the most direct engagement with the realities of
city departments in LADP. As described by Cesaretti in Camera, the LAPD was one of the most
“visible and vital of the city’s agencies,” which represented “a microcosm of Los Angeles urban
life.”
490
Even though the portraits paradoxically seem removed from reality because of the
graininess of the film, the blur of movement, and the cropped, close-up views that divorce the
LADP cadets from any background context, Cesaretti’s portfolio recenters the LADP’s concern
with the realities of the city. They reveal a hidden mechanism of the city—police training
processes—that otherwise would go unnoticed, much in the way the other photographers focused
on banal, unnoticed architecture around the city. Cesaretti’s photographs, however, also
490
Gusmano Cesaretti, Camera Magazine 2 (February 1981): 42.
236
challenge the realism and documentary capacity of the other photography portfolios included.
The technical and formal choices dominate, foregrounding the sense that this is a stylized
representation of the cadets, but also drawing attention back to the ways the other portfolios have
made subtler but just as significant formal choices. By heightening perception of his intervention
as photographer, Cesaretti highlights the artifice of the LAPD, the city, and its representations.
Like the photographs in Housing Authority pamphlets, the spreads in Arts & Architecture
Magazine, and Harry Drinkwater’s photographs for 66 Signs of Neon, the LADP tested the
boundaries of photographic genre. Architectural photography raised issues concerning not just
the image of cities but also the artistic status of the medium of photography. Surveying the
LADP refocuses attention on how photographers, writers, and curators have imposed boundaries
on photographic genres, retroactively siphoning off meaning and influence exchanged between
commercial and non-commercial practices. Critics, curators, and photographers searched for
photography’s purest form of social critique or institutional critique in the 1970s. The LADP did
not provide an answer, avoiding an overarching message on the city or how to photograph the
city to realize deeper truths about it. Instead, it incorporates perspectives from documentary
photography, commercial photography, and fine art photography and it does not settle on one
approach. In this sense, it reflects the confusion of methods and the frenzy for new critical angles
about photographing the urban landscape that characterized the decade both in and outside of
Los Angeles. In its lack of a conclusive lesson, however, is a lesson: whether or not photography
could change the way the public approached urban problems mattered less than how it made
cities appear.
237
238
Conclusion—Janna Ireland and the Legacies of Architectural Photography
In 1937, Black architect Paul Revere Williams wrote an article for The American
Magazine titled “I am a Negro.” Williams walks readers through the W.E.B. Dubois-esque
double consciousness of working as a sought-after architect to the stars of Los Angeles while
also being Black and discriminated against as a resident. He chronicles his rise to success despite
of the racism levelled against him, growing his clientele “which prospered with the mushroom
growth of Los Angeles.”
491
In addition to building residential mansions around the city, Williams
worked on a variety of architectural projects over his long career, working from the 1920s
through the 1970s.
Williams’s career went understudied for many decades until recent years, in part thanks
to a joint acquisition of his archive by the University of Southern California School of
Architecture and The Getty Research Institute. Yet the project giving his career some of its best
visibility is photographer Janna Ireland’s ongoing journey to track down and capture all of his
architectural works, published most comprehensively in the photobook Regarding Paul Williams
(2020). Ireland has photographed dozens of Williams’s residential and business projects,
amassing an archive of his most famous works and those that have been forgotten. Through her
photographs and an accompanying introductory essay, she explores how Williams’s career could
have only unfolded in Los Angeles, as he began practicing in the 1920s and his assignments
proliferated alongside the city’s population and urban development. She also works to uncover
the complexity of Williams’s career, captured in his American Magazine essay, that he acted as
much more than an architect to the stars.
491
Paul Revere Williams, “I am a Negro,” The American Magazine (July 1937): 161.
239
One of Williams’s more significant buildings was the completion in 1949 of the
headquarters for Golden State Mutual Life Insurance (GSM), the largest Black-owned life
insurance company. The company employed dozens of Black workers and stood as a pillar of
self-determination and uplift and the building, located prominently on a corner lot in the West
Adams neighborhood of Los Angeles, symbolized, as historian Laura Dominguez phrases it, “the
entrepreneurial spirit of westward Black settlers.”
492
With her representation of the GSM
building, Ireland gives a sense of its monumentality and symbolism of the greater Los Angeles
Black experience (fig. 5.1). Printed in Regarding Paul Williams across two pages, it spreads out
symmetrically, its two wings perfectly complementing each other in the frame. The black-and-
white photograph has been shot in direct sunlight against an evenly gray sky, and Ireland has cut
off the bottom of the building and any distractions from the street. At the very bottom of the
frame, nearly cut off, is the original Golden State Mutual Life sign, the thin sans-serif
typography signaling back to the 1940s. The building is not entirely divorced from the
surrounding context of the urban landscape, however. In shooting the building head-on, Ireland
has given a clear legibility to the “Adams Bl” street sign, geolocating the building and reminding
us of its importance to the Black neighborhood.
In photographing the GSM building and dozens of other Williams’ buildings, Ireland not
only gives new visibility to the architecture, but she resuscitates and reworks the history of
commercial architectural photography that I have discussed in my dissertation. Like the two
photographs of the Lytton Savings Bank with which I began this dissertation, here, too was a
building shot twice: once, in 2017 by Ireland and once, likely in 1949, by Harry Drinkwater (fig.
492
Laura Dominguez, “Architect Paul R. Williams,” Report and Recommendation of the Los Angeles Mayor’s
Office Civic Working Group, 2021. http://civicmemory.la/.
240
5.2). Drinkwater photographed the GSM building for Williams. It is not clear whether the
photographs were ever published, and they currently sit unprinted as negatives in Drinkwater’s
archive, held at the Getty Research Institute. Drinkwater photographed the GSM building from
across the street, cattycorner, and the photographs show the building in the context of the road
and the neighboring buildings. They are not detailed shots of the architecture, and electrical
wires block the central façade somewhat. The photographs, in other words, stand in stark
contrast formally to Ireland’s impressive odes to Williams’s architecture. Ireland’s photograph
raises to new significance what Drinkwater’s photographs might have done, but never did.
493
Ireland’s project also focuses attention on the figure of the photographer in ways that many
commercial architectural photographers, including Drinkwater, never achieved, their work
always sidelined both in publications and archives to the architecture pictured.
Ireland’s project on Williams was not made as a rephotography project as historians of
photography conceive of the term. Unlike photographer Mark Klett’s rephotographic survey
project that sent Klett in the 1970s to photograph the precise sites photographed by Timothy
O’Sullivan in the late nineteenth century, Ireland’s purposes were not to engage with past
photographic representations.
494
Yet I see the coincidence of her shared subject matter with
Drinkwater as an invitation for considering how her project raises important questions for the
study of twenty-first-century commercial architectural photography and its intersection with the
genre’s history, its failures, and the possibilities for representation that it conjured.
493
More speculatively, the connection between Ireland and Drinkwater also resonates with scholar Tina Campt’s
theorization of the future real conditional tense, or that which will have had to happen, as a way to think through the
possibilities of Black feminist futures. In this “tense of possibilities,” Campt imagines the events which will have
had to happen to give rise to future events. Drinkwater, in other words, had to have photographed GSM in order for
Ireland to revisit the subject. Tina Campt, Listening to Images (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).
494
Mark Klett, ed. Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1984); Klett, ed. Reconstructing the View: The Grand Canyon Photographs of Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
241
Ireland does not consider herself an architectural photographer, nor a documentary
photographer.
495
In her book, she narrates the beginning of her project, when she had no
experience photographing buildings but was searching for a new assignment. Perhaps
unsurprisingly, Ireland in fact defines her project contra architectural photography, remarking
that the latter is “designed to sell a space. It asks, what purpose does a building or room serve?”
Her project, by contrast, aims to “to create an experience of Williams’s work that was about the
feeling of living in his spaces and loving them.”
496
In many ways, however, her work continues
the formal and social concerns of the architectural photography I have discussed in my
dissertation. Her book, which runs 224 pages, consists of hundreds of beautiful, elegiac (as one
review called them) prints of the interiors and exteriors of Williams’s project.
497
She experiments
with her approach, sometimes shooting façades head-on in ways that recall the distanced,
deadpan building photographs of the Los Angeles Documentary Project (fig. 5.3). In others, she
focuses on the abstract details of light and shadow provoked through the sinuous curves of
William’s architecture (fig. 5.4). While flipping the pages, viewers get lost in the immersive
details of the building, and lose a sense of context or sense of place.
Yet in spite of her careful detail work, Ireland focuses her attention on what Williams’s
oeuvre conveys about place. Photographing the individual buildings is Ireland’s way of “making
sense” of Los Angeles as a whole.
498
Her descriptions of devotedly traveling around the city to
track down homes and homeowners is reminiscent of the working process of many professional
photographers discussed in this project, who learned about the city through traversing the city by
495
Janna Ireland, “The Architecture of an Icon,” Regarding Paul Williams (Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith, 2020), 9.
496
Ibid.
497
Erin Kaplan, “Paul R. Williams in Los Angeles: A Conversation with Janna Ireland,” December 22, 2020.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/paul-r-williams-in-los-angeles-a-conversation-with-janna-ireland/.
498
Ireland, “The Architecture of an Icon,” 15.
242
car, assignment to assignment. The project, moreover, is socially engaged for Ireland, because
she sees her labor as a photographer as reviving the difficulties it took for Williams to work as a
Black man in the city. It has functioned as her own way of contending with the difficulty of
working as a Black professional or rather fine artist, writing that her quest to photograph his
architecture has been a testament to Williams’s “labor and persistence” as much as to the
architecture itself.
499
In spite of her rejection of the genre, Ireland’s work draws upon traditions of commercial
architectural photography, and criticisms surrounding the genre, in many ways. She shows her
subjects in a glowing light. She is allegiant to Williams’s projects, never betraying his or their
faults. Even when she shows details of buildings’ destruction (fig. 5.5), she carefully captures
rubble in natural light, letting it shine. Exemplified in the cropped GSM building photograph,
Ireland often takes the buildings out of context of their position in the urban landscape, but
nonetheless attempts to create a portrait of Los Angeles out of isolated details (fig. 5.6). While
Williams died long before she began her career, Ireland carefully studied his work, and aimed to
excavate the feelings of space that he intended through his designs. As such, her work might be
said to reanimate the criticisms levelled at commercial architectural photography: critics such as
Cervin Robinson who claimed that it fails to establish a critical distance from its subjects, and
reproduces the desires of its clients without allowing viewers to assess the projects on their own
terms.
500
Ireland also did not photograph Williams’s public housing projects—Pueblo Del Rio
and Nickerson Gardens—a notable absence especially for the way these projects are framed with
regard to Williams’s political orientation.
501
In Ireland’s words, these projects prove his
499
Ibid.
500
Cervin Robinson, “Architectural Photography: Complaints about the Standard Product.” Journal of Architectural
Education 29, No. 2 (1979): 5-10.
501
I am still trying to get an answer as to why this is.
243
“commitment to elevating his community and his belief that everyone deserves a dignified place
to live.”
502
The selectiveness of this gesture thus begs the straightforward question of whose Los
Angeles is being portrayed, given that Williams’s public housing projects are those most
occupied by poor, mostly Black residents. It also thematizes the larger difficulties of commercial
architectural photography’s social investment. The projects with which commercial architectural
photography was involved in the mid-twentieth century aimed on scales big and small to make a
better world through collective city planning initiatives, the design of economical single-family
homes, the transformation of junk into beautiful art, and documentary projects about the city’s
realities. Yet during this period many activists and scholars argued that the nature of such change
was not enough, that they merely upheld the status quo plaguing the non-privileged of cities
without enacting true revolution. Stuck in the middle, commercial architectural photography has
been understood to adopt the social and racial politics of its assignments, without a careful
consideration of how, in reality, photography at best usually presents a manipulated and revised
version of its clients’ positions.
503
So how, then, can Ireland’s project about Williams be both a reckoning with the absences
of Black professionals in architectural and photography histories and also a reproduction of what
critics thought made commercial architectural photography ultimately a handmaiden to
capitalism? Her photography exemplifies the ambivalence towards subject and towards
representation that emerge in all the projects discussed in this dissertation. Caught in their
clients’ desire for progressive but often only surface-level urban change, commercial
architectural photographers produced images of Los Angeles the way they knew best: through
502
Ireland, “The Architecture of an Icon,” 15.
503
Dianne Harris, “Modeling Race and Class: Architectural Photography and the U.S. Gypsum Research Village,
1952–1955,” in Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present) eds. Irene
Cheng, Charles L. Davis III, Mabel O. Wilson (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020).
244
beautiful, technically advanced portraits of buildings that could serve as proxy imaginaries of
what the city could become. Ireland’s project is a fitting way to contend with Williams’s legacy
because it reinforces how much his architecture, and the architecture of his contemporaries, was
built through photography, and photography’s ability to make the architecture stand as the image
of the city.
This dissertation has examined the diversity of expression of mid-twentieth century
commercial architectural photography. It chronicles the photographic genre through its proximity
to social documentary photography of the 1930s, the apex of its glamorous reputation, its critical
reckoning with urban uprising, and its relationship to fine art photography. What remained
constant through these related but distinct projects was the way Los Angeles remained a subject
with which photographers could experiment. Never settled on whether its identity was what
Mike Davis would call either the sunshine or the noir, architectural photographers used the idea
of Los Angeles to propose how photography related to urban architecture and how photography
could change the way cities looked.
504
Ireland’s project takes us back to the social concern and
the optimistic potential of an earlier generation of commercial architectural photography. Indeed,
civic activists see potential in her photography project for imagining the future of the city.
Ireland’s photography was highlighted in The Los Angeles Mayor’s Office Civic Memory
Working Group’s report, an interdisciplinary group of scholars, artists, curators, and civic
professionals convened by Mayor Eric Garcetti to “to help Los Angeles, so long in thrall to its
reputation as a city of the future, engage more productively and honestly with its past.”
505
The
report contained an agglomeration of recommendations to support increased attention to civic
504
Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage Books, 1992).
505
Report and Recommendation of the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office Civic Working Group, 2021.
http://civicmemory.la/.
245
and cultural history in the city, reminiscent of the flurry of reports and plans to improve Los
Angeles in the early 1940s. It included several photographic portfolios, one of which was
Ireland’s photography of Williams’s architecture.
The Civic Memory’s website prominently features a quotation by writer Octavia Butler,
who remarked that Los Angeles “forms and shatters, forms and shatters.”
506
In Ireland’s
photography, a thoughtful rejoinder to this outlook, a past era of architecture could be said to
shatter and form, but it does not shatter all over again. Ireland uses photography and architecture
to give a permanent and lasting visual form to Williams’s architecture and, by proxy, to the city,
which is how she best extends the propositions of earlier commercial architectural photography.
Ireland can revel in the beauty of her portraits, on the strength and endurance of their form, as a
means of using photography as a social intervention. She achieves what earlier commercial
architectural photography sought to do: to show that the beauty of the photograph did not
necessarily stand in contradiction to its social concern.
In common parlance, the field of contemporary commercial architectural photography
remains associated with the superficiality of real estate and the elitism of architecture and design
magazines. Its images are reputed to be formulaic, evacuated of meaning beyond selling their
subjects, a criticism that, as I have shown, has appeared since the genre’s professional formation.
Photographers such as Ireland want no association with the genre. This dissertation demonstrated
that this has never been the genre’s sole function. Thanks to the work of photographers and an
optimistic group of clients, commercial architectural photography expanded the boundaries of
both photography and architecture, as well as their social roles and responsibilities. Ultimately, it
may have lost the battle and reified the status quo, of a certain supremacy of real estate and elite
506
Ibid.
246
architectural interests in the city, at the expense of revolutionary change. It may even help
confirm many theorists’ worst fear, that photography only aestheticizes politics. Yet there is
another way to situate its influence: it gave form to a future that could be changed incrementally,
first by seeing one building differently. The genre’s history requires a new approach to the
history of United States photography, one that insists that a close study of commercial
photography’s form and technique can lead to insights beyond a hermetic formalism. It exposes
how even the most standard approaches to representation have guided and determined
photography’s social investments.
247
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Appendix A: Figures
Figure 0.1: Case Study House #22, Los Angeles, 1960, Pierre Koenig,
architect, photo by Julius Shulman. Julius Shulman Photography Archive,
Getty Research Institute, 2004.R.10
267
Figure 0.2: Ed Ruscha, from Some Los Angeles Apartments, 1965.
268
Figure 0.3: Julius Shulman, Lytton Savings Bank, 1960, Shulman Photography Archive, 2004.R.10
Getty Research Institute.
269
Figure 0.4: Ed Ruscha, Jerry McMillan. 1965, Edward Ruscha photographs of Sunset
Boulevard and Hollywood Boulevard, 1965-2010. 2012.M.1 Getty Research Institute.
270
Figure 0.5: Julius Shulman, Portrait of Paul R. Williams, 1952. © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty
Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10)
271
Figure 0.6: Harry Drinkwater, John H. Smith in Chemosphere house, 1966. Collection of
Jafiel Drinkwater.
272
Figure 0.7: Julius Shulman, Photographing Architecture and Interiors (New
York: Whitney Publications, 1962), page 54.
273
Figure 0.8: Charles Sheeler, Criss-Crossed Conveyors, River Rouge Plant, Ford
Motor Company , 1927
274
Figure 0.9: Romare Bearden, cover of Fortune Magazine, 1968.
275
Figure 0.10: Ed Ruscha photograph, page 32 & 33 of Steven Izenour, Robert Venturi, Denise
Scott-Brown, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Urban Form (Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press, 1977) [1972].
276
Figure 0.11: Beverly Hills, looking down Rodeo Drive from Santa Monica Boulevard
toward Wilshire, Los Angeles: 1932-33 by Anton Wagner, PC 017, California Historical
Society
277
Figure 0.12: Don Normark, Eviction, May 9, 1959.
278
Figure 0.13: Martha Rosler, The Bowery in Two Inadequate Description Systems, 1974-75
279
Figure 0.14: Hans Haacke, Shapolsky et al Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social
System as of May 1, 1971, 1971. 9 photostats, 142 gelatin silver prints, and 142 photocopies.
Whitney Museum of American Art.
280
Figure 0.15: Los Angeles, 1971, Henry Wessel Jr. Gelatin silver on Dupont Veragam paper
print. 7 15/16 x 11 7/8 in. Purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council of the J.
Paul Getty Museum. © Henry Wessel
281
Figure 0.16: Manplan Architectural Review, September 9, 1969.
282
Figure 1.1: Maynard Parker, Architectural Digest V olume X, no. 9 (1939).
T h e A r c h i t e c t u r a l D i g e s t
Residence of M r. and Mrs. Lloyd Bacon. 'Toluca Lake— Paul R. Williams, Architect
IV. & J. Sloanc, Interior Decorators
Swimming Pool, Paddock Engineering Company
Fireplace Fixtures: Colonial Shops
Gas Heating: Payne Furnace G? Supply Company, Inc.
Ornamental Iron: Selak Iron Works
Venetian Blinds: National Venetian Blind Company
Photo Maynard L. Parker
283
Figure 1.2: Cover, Cities Are For People: The Los Angeles Region Plans for Living,
1942, written by Mel B. Scott, designed by Alvin Lustig, drawings by Bob Holdeman.
284
Figure 1.3: Julius Shulman for The Haynes Foundation, featured in Cities are for People
285
Figure 1.4: Page Cities are for People, page 21
286
Figure 1.5: Julius Shulman for the Haynes Foundation, 1941. Julius Shulman Photography
Archive, Box 975, 2004.R.10. Getty Research Institute
287
Figure 1.6: Installation, …And Now We Plan, Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science, and Art,
1941. Natural History Museum of LA. Photographs by Julius Shulman.
288
Figure 1.7: Julius Shulman, photograph of Alvin Lustig in his office, 1947-8. Julius
Shulman Photography Archive, Box 975, 2004.R.10. Getty Research Institute.
289
Figure 1.8: page 12, Cities are for People. The Los Angeles Region Plans for Living,
1942, written by Mel B. Scott, designed by Alvin Lustig, drawings by Bob Holdeman.
290
Figure 1.9: page 28, Cities are for People. The Los Angeles Region Plans for Living,
1942, written by Mel B. Scott, designed by Alvin Lustig, drawings by Bob Holdeman.
291
Figure 1.10: page 4, Cities are for People. The Los Angeles Region Plans for Living,
1942, written by Mel B. Scott, designed by Alvin Lustig, drawings by Bob Holdeman.
292
Figure 1.11: Alfred Stieglitz, New York from the Shelton, gelatin silver print, 1935. Alfred
Stieglitz Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
293
Figure 1.12: Lisette Model, Window, Bonwit Teller, between 1939 and 7 December 1940,
gelatin silver print. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
294
Figure 1.14: Anton Wagner, Sandwich shop, Wilshire Boulevard and Le Doux Road., east on Wilshire
Boulevard, 1932-33. California Historical Society.
295
Figure 1.15: Page 46, photographs by Julius Shulman, Cities are for People.
The Los Angeles Region Plans for Living, 1942, written by Mel B. Scott,
designed by Alvin Lustig, drawings by Bob Holdeman.
296
Figure 1.16: Page 51, photograph by Julius Shulman, Cities are for People.
The Los Angeles Region Plans for Living, 1942, written by Mel B. Scott,
designed by Alvin Lustig, drawings by Bob Holdeman.
297
Figure 1.17: Photograph by Roger Sturtevant, Simon Eisner, “Urban Redevelopment-it’s wonderful!” Arts &
Architecture Magazine, December 1943.
298
Figure 1.18: Page 53, Cities are for People. The Los Angeles Region Plans for Living,
1942, written by Mel B. Scott, designed by Alvin Lustig, drawings by Bob Holdeman.
299
Figure 1.19: Photographs by Julius Shulman, Richard Neutra, “Planning Postwar
Fabrication,” Arts & Architecture, May 1943, p. 23.
300
Figure 1.20: Page 55-56, Cities are for People. The Los Angeles Region Plans for Living, 1942, written by Mel B.
Scott, designed by Alvin Lustig, drawings by Bob Holdeman.
301
Figure 1.21: Page 57-58, Cities are for People. The Los Angeles Region Plans for Living, 1942, written by Mel B.
Scott, designed by Alvin Lustig, drawings by Bob Holdeman.
302
Figure 1.22: Page 59-60, Cities are for People. The Los Angeles Region Plans for Living, 1942, written by Mel B.
Scott, designed by Alvin Lustig, drawings by Bob Holdeman.
303
Figure 1.23: Page 59-60, Photographs by Julius Shulman, Cities are for People. The Los Angeles Region
Plans for Living, 1942, written by Mel B. Scott, designed by Alvin Lustig, drawings by Bob Holdeman.
304
Figure 1.24: …And Now We Plan, exhibition brochure (Los Angeles: Pacific
Southwest Academy, 1941). The Huntington Library.
305
Figure 1.25: Page 57-58, detail. Cities are for People. The Los Angeles Region Plans for Living, 1942,
written by Mel B. Scott, designed by Alvin Lustig, drawings by Bob Holdeman.
306
Figure 1.26: Julius Shulman for the Haynes Foundation, 1941. Julius Shulman Photography Archive, Box 975,
2004.R.10. Getty Research Institute
307
Figure 1.27: Julius Shulman, 1939. Julius Shulman Photography Archive, Box 402, 2004.R.10. Getty
Research Institute
308
Figure 1.28: Homes for Heroes cover, designed by Alvin Lustig, 1942. Los Angeles
City Archives.
309
Figure 1.29: Homes for Heroes page 2, designed by Alvin Lustig, 1942. Los Angeles
City Archives.
310
Figure 1.30: Photograph by Julius Shulman Homes for Heroes pages 24-25 designed by Alvin Lustig,
1942. Los Angeles City Archives.
311
Figure 1.31: Channel Heights, Ramona Gardens, Homes for Heroes, designed by Alvin Lustig, 1942.
Los Angeles City Archives.
312
Figure 1.32: Leonard Nadel, Channel Heights Project, 1951, Housing Authority of the
City of Los Angeles.
313
Figure 1.33: Leonard Nadel, “Pueblo del Rio: The Study of a Planned Community,” pages 8-9, 1948. Box 11, Nadel
(Leonard) Photographs and other material relating to housing and urban redevelopment in Los Angeles, Getty Research
Institute, 2002.M.42.
314
Figure 1.34: Leonard Nadel, “Pueblo del Rio: The Study of a Planned Community,” pages 26-27, 1948. Box 11, Nadel
(Leonard) Photographs and other material relating to housing and urban redevelopment in Los Angeles, Getty Research
Institute, 2002.M.42.
315
Figure 1.35: Leonard Nadel, “Pueblo del Rio: The Study of a Planned Community,” pages 34-35, 1948. Box 11,
Nadel (Leonard) Photographs and other material relating to housing and urban redevelopment in Los Angeles,
Getty Research Institute, 2002.M.42.
316
Figure 1.36: Leonard Nadel, “Pueblo del Rio: The Study of a Planned Community,” pages 36-37, 1948. Box 11,
Nadel (Leonard) Photographs and other material relating to housing and urban redevelopment in Los Angeles,
Getty Research Institute, 2002.M.42.
317
Figure 1.37: Leonard Nadel, “Pueblo del Rio: The Study of a Planned Community,” pages 50-51, 1948. Box 11,
Nadel (Leonard) Photographs and other material relating to housing and urban redevelopment in Los Angeles,
Getty Research Institute, 2002.M.42.
318
Figure 1.38: Leonard Nadel, “Pueblo del Rio: The Study of a Planned Community,” pages 94-95, 1948. Box 11,
Nadel (Leonard) Photographs and other material relating to housing and urban redevelopment in Los Angeles,
Getty Research Institute, 2002.M.42.
319
Figure 1.39: Mel B. Scott, cover of Metropolitan Los Angeles: One Community, designed
by Alvin Lustig (Los Angeles: Pacific Southwest Academy), 1949.
320
Figure 1.40: Julius Shulman, “Case Study House No. 22,” in Arts & Architecture Magazine (June
1960).
321
Figure 2.1: Julius Shulman, photograph of Raphael Soriano interior, page 18 of
Photographing Architecture and Interiors, 1961
322
Figure 2.2: Page 23 from December 1930 California Arts & Architecture. Photographs
by William Clarke.
323
Figure 2.3: William Woolett, California Arts & Architecture, January 1935, The
Huntington Library
324
Figure 2.4: Alvin Lustig, California Arts & Architecture, February 1942. Archives of American
Art, Smithsonian Institution
325
Figure 2.5: John Follis, Arts & Architecture, May 1950
326
Figure 2.6: Julius Shulman, Arts & Architecture June 1960, third and fourth page of spread on Case
Study House 22
327
Figure 2.7: Dearborn-Massar, Arts & Architecture, April 1956.
328
Figure 2.8: Julius Shulman, Arts & Architecture July 1947
329
Figure 2.9: Julius Shulman, Arts & Architecture, February 1952
330
Figure 2.10: Uncredited photographer, Arts & Architecture, April 1964
331
Figure 2.11: Marvin Rand, Arts & Architecture, September 1950
332
Figure 2.12: Edward Weston, cover of California Arts and Architecture, January 1941.
The Huntington Library
333
Figure 2.13: Edward Weston, cover of California Arts and Architecture, September
1941. The Huntington Library
334
Figure 2.14: Public housing article , Arts & Architecture May 1943. The Huntington
Library.
335
Figure 2.15: Public housing article , Arts & Architecture May 1943. The Huntington Library.
336
Figure 2.16: Louis Clyde Stoumen, Arts & Architecture, August 1946.
337
Figure 2.17: Photographs by Jay Connor, Tom Riggs, Arts & Architecture May 1949, first page of spread
on Wurdeman & Becket Prudential Building.
338
Figure 2.18: Charles Kratka, Arts & Architecture, May 1949
339
Figure 2.19: Photograph by Jay Connor, Tom Riggs, Arts & Architecture, May 1949
340
Figure 2.20: Photographs by Jay Connor, Tom Riggs, Arts & Architecture, May 1949
341
Figure 2.21: Photographs by James Reed, Arts & Architecture, December 1950
342
Figure 2.21: “Glamourized Houses,” Life Magazine, April 11, 1949, pp. 146-7, photograph by Julius Shulman.
343
Figure 2.23: Photograph by Julius Shulman, Los Angeles Times Home
Magazine, June 15, 1947.
344
Figure 2.24: György Kepes, Arts & Architecture, May 1951
345
Figure 2.25: Max Yavno, cover of Arts & Architecture September 1951
346
Figure 2.26: Max Yavno, page from Steelbilt Sliding glass door supplement, Arts & Architecture
September 1951
347
Figure 2.27: Uncredited photographer, cover of Arts & Architecture, February 1961.
348
Figure 2.28: Dick Whittington Studio, page two of ”House in ‘Industry,’” Arts &
Architecture, November 1947.
349
Figure 2.29: Dick Whittington Studio, page five, ”House in ‘Industry,’” Arts &
Architecture, November 1947.
350
Fig. 2.30: Dick Whittington Studio, page ten, ”House in ‘Industry,’” Arts &
Architecture November 1947
351
Figure 2.31: “The Family of Man,” in Arts & Architecture, March 1955.
352
Figure 2.32: James Reed, Arts & Architecture, July 1951
353
Figure 2.33: Marvin Rand, Esther McCoy, Julius Shulman, Arts & Architecture, October 1963
354
Figure 2.34: Ed Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966. Edward Ruscha photographs of
Sunset Boulevard and Hollywood Boulevard, 1965-2010. 2012.M.1. Getty Research Institute.
355
Figure 2.35: Arts & Architecture, July/August 1967.
356
Figure 3.1: Harry Drinkwater, installation of 66 Signs of Neon, likely at USC or UCLA,
1966. Collection of Jafiel Drinkwater.
357
Figure 3.2: Harry Drinkwater, John H. Smith interiors, mid-1950s. Harry Drinkwater
Photographs, Getty Research Institute, 2011.R.23.
358
Figure 3.3: Harry Drinkwater, Golden State Mutual Life Insurance building, 1949[?].
Harry Drinkwater Photographs, Getty Research Institute, 2011.R.23. *Note*
(negative still to be digitized, this is inverted photograph of negative behind mylar)
359
Figure 3.4: Harry Drinkwater, John H. Smith. n.d. Collection of Jafiel Drinkwater.
360
Figure 3.5: Harry Drinkwater, in Garrett Eckbo, The Landscape We See See (New York:
McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1969).
361
Figure 3.6: Harry Drinkwater, Ambassador College, Pasadena, in Garrett Eckbo,
Urban Landscape Design (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964).
362
Figure 3.7: Lithograph cover from photograph by Harry Drinkwater, Garrett
Eckbo, The Landscape We See (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1969).
363
Figure 3.8: Harry Drinkwater, Ambassador College, Pasadena, in Garrett
Eckbo, Urban Landscape Design (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company,
1964).
364
Figure 3.9: Photographer unknown. Join for the Arts scrapbook, page 14. Scrapbook, 1935-
1938, 1966-1997, Box 1, Folder 31, Noah Purifoy papers, 1935-1998, bulk 1971-1998.
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
365
Figure 3.10: Harry Drinkwater, 66 Signs of Neon installed at either USC or UCLA, 1966.
Collection of Jafiel Drinkwater.
366
Figure 3.11: Noah Purifoy, David Mann, Judson Powell, The Sink (1966), photograph by
harry Drinkwater. Page 11, Junk Art (Los Angeles: 66 Signs of Neon, 1966). Noah Purifoy
Foundation.
367
Figure 3.12: Installation view of the exhibit “The Family of Man,” January 24, 1955–May 8, 1955. Photographic
Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. IN569.5. Photograph by Ezra Stoller.
368
Figure 3.13: Charles Eames, Mies van der Rohe Exhibition, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1947.
369
THIRTY-FIVE CENTS AUGUST 20, 1965
Figure 3.14: TIME Magazine, V ol. 86, No. 1, August 20, 1965.
370
Figure 3.15: Harry Drinkwater, 66 Signs of Neon installed at either
the Los Angeles Sports Arena or UCLA. Collection of Jafiel
Drinkwater.
371
Figure 3.16: Unattributed, 66 Signs of Neon installed at the Watts Renaissance
Festival. Herald Examiner Collection, dated 1967 but might be 1966.
https://tessa.lapl.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/photos/id/11699/rec/2
372
Figure 3.17: John Malmin Los Angeles Times, 1965.
373
Figure 3.18: American Cement Corporation Annual Meeting 1966 Brochure, including photograph of Noah
Purifoy, middle, at shareholder’s meeting, where 66 Signs of Neon was exhibited. Noah Purifoy Papers,
Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.
374
Figure 3.19: Harry Drinkwater, Noah Purifoy speaking to two men, 66 Signs of Neon
installed at USC or UCLA. Collection of Jafiel Drinkwater.
375
Figure 3.20: Harry Drinkwater, Noah Purifoy speaking to two men, 66 Signs of Neon
installed at USC or UCLA. Collection of Jafiel Drinkwater.
376
Figure 3.21: Noah Purifoy, Judson Powell, Debby Brewer, Al Khanasa,
photograph sby Harry Drinkwater. Cover of Junk Art (Los Angeles: 66 Signs of
Neon, 1966), Noah Purifoy Foundation.
377
Figure 3.22: Noah Purifoy, Judson Powell, Debby Brewer, Al Khanasa,
photographs by Harry Drinkwater. Page from Junk Art (Los Angeles: 66
Signs of Neon, 1966), Noah Purifoy Foundation.
378
Figure 3.23: Arthur Secunda, The City, photograph by Harry Drinkwater.
Page 6, Junk Art (Los Angeles: 1966), Noah Purifoy Foundation.
379
Figure 3.24: George Fry or John Malmin for Los Angeles Times. Aerial view of two
buildings on fire on Avalon Blvd. between 107th and 108th street during Watts Riots,
1965
380
Figure 3.25: Harry Drinkwater, photograph of Debby Brewer’s Sunflowers, 1966. Collection
of Jafiel Drinkwater.
381
Figure 3.26: Harry Drinkwater, photograph of Debby Brewer’s Sunflowers, in Untitled,
published by Joined for the Arts in Watts in 1967, Now Dig This! Art in Black Los
Angeles, 1960–1980 Digital Archive. Los Angeles: Hammer Museum.
382
Figure 4.1: John Humble, 178
th
and Manhattan Place, Torrance, from the Los Angeles
Documentary Project, 1979, silver dye bleach print, cover of Camera Magazine, February
1981.
383
Figure 4,2: Map included in Concept Los Angeles: The Concept of the Los Angeles
General Plan, 1974
384
Figure 4.3: Cover of Concept Los Angeles: The Concept of the Los Angeles General
Plan, 1974
385
Figure 4.4: John Humble, 349 Rose Ave., Venice, from the Los Angeles Documentary
Project, 1980, silver dye bleach print, Smithsonian American Art Museum
386
Figure 4.5: Stephen Shore, Hunley Drive, Los Angeles, 6/16/75 (center). As included in exhibition Signs
of Life: Symbols in the American City (1976), Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour
387
Figure 4.6: The Visual Environment of Los Angeles (1971)
388
Figure 4.7: The Visual Environment of Los Angeles (1971)
389
Figure 4.8: The New City: Architecture and Urban Renewal, exhibition catalogue cover,
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1967
390
Figure 4.9: The New City: Architecture and Urban Renewal, exhibition installation, The
Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1967
391
Figure 4.10: Art Sinsabaugh, Chicago Landscape #299, 1966. Museum of Modern Art, NY
392
Figure 4.11: The Visual Environment of Los Angeles, page 7 (1971)
393
Figure 4.6: Douglas Hill, cover of Camera 57 no. 5 (May 1978).
394
Figure 4.13: Douglas Hill, Untitled, from the Los Angeles Documentary Project, 1979, silver dye bleach print,
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the National Endowment for the Arts through the Photography
Museum of Los Angeles, 1990.38.45, © 1979, Douglas Hillc
395
Figure 4.14: Julius Shulman, Richard Neutra’s Kun House, 1936, Getty Research Institute.
396
Figure 4.15: Douglas Hill, Untitled, from the Los Angeles Documentary Project, 1979, silver dye bleach print,
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the National Endowment for the Arts through the Photography
Museum of Los Angeles
397
Figure 4.16: Douglas Hill, Untitled, from the Los Angeles Documentary Project, 1980, silver dye bleach print,
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the National Endowment for the Arts through the Photography
Museum of Los Angeles, 1990.38.52,
398
Figure 4.17: Douglas Hill, Untitled, from the Los Angeles Documentary Project, 1980, silver dye bleach print,
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the National Endowment for the Arts through the Photography
Museum of Los Angeles, 1990.38.53, © 1979, Douglas Hill
399
Figure 4.18: Bill Owens, L. A. Freeway, from the Los Angeles Documentary Project, 1980, chromogenic
print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the National Endowment for the Arts through
the Photography Museum of Los Angeles, 1990.38.83, © 1980, Bill Owens
400
Figure 4.19: Susan Ressler, Architectural Digest, Los Angeles, from the Los Angeles Documentary Project, 1979,
gelatin silver print.
401
Figure 4.20: Charles S. White, Architectural Digest, May 1980
402
Figure 4.21: Joe Deal, Atlantic Ave. Looking North from Ocean Blvd., Long Beach,
California, from the Long Beach Documentary Survey Project, 1980, gelatin silver print,
Smithsonian American Art Museum,
403
Figure 4.22: Joe Deal, Back Yard, Diamond Bar, CA, from the Los Angeles Documentary
Project, 1980, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum,
404
Figure 4.23: Joe Deal, Back Yard, Diamond Bar, CA, from the Los Angeles Documentary
Project, 1980, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum
405
Figure 4.24: Robbert Flick, Inglewood from Sequential Views, 1980, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian
American Art Museum
406
Figure 4.25: Gusmano Cesaretti, Untitled, from the Los Angeles Documentary Project, 1979-1980,
gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum,
407
Figure 5.1: Janna Ireland, Golden State Mutual Life Insurance building by architect Paul
R. Williams (1999 West Adams Boulevard), built in 1949. Photographed in 2017.
408
Figure 5.2: Harry Drinkwater, Golden State Mutual Life Insurance building, 1949(?).
Harry Drinkwater Photographs, Getty Research Institute, 2011.R.23.
409
Figure 5.3: Janna Ireland, SeaView, Rancho Palos Verdes, Number 1, 2018
410
Figure 5.4: Janna Ireland, Home of Paul R. Williams, n.d.
411
Figure 5.5: Janna Ireland, 100 North Delfern Drive, built for
Charles M. Weinberg in 1938, partially demolished in 2019.
Photographed in 2019.
412
Figure 5.6: Janna Ireland, Golden State Mutual Life Insurance building
by architect Paul R. Williams (1999 West Adams Boulevard), built in
1949. Photographed in 2017.
413
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Wade, Isabel Frampton
(author)
Core Title
Exposing urban form: commercial architectural photography in Los Angeles, 1938-81
School
College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
Art History
Degree Conferral Date
2023-08
Publication Date
07/17/2025
Defense Date
05/05/2023
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
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(digital)
Tag
American art,architectural photography,Douglas Hill,Harry Drinkwater,history of photography,John Humble,Julius Shulman,Leonard Nadel,los angeles,magazines,modern architecture,modern art,modern design,Noah Purifoy,OAI-PMH Harvest,Public housing,twentieth century,urbanism,Watts Riots
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), Deverell, William (
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Tags
American art
architectural photography
Douglas Hill
Harry Drinkwater
history of photography
John Humble
Julius Shulman
Leonard Nadel
modern architecture
modern art
modern design
Noah Purifoy
twentieth century
urbanism
Watts Riots