Once on a departing flight from LAX, Mark Ruwedel glanced down from the height of his window seat and noticed a short tract of sand between the runway and the coastal highway. What stretched out below him was the El Segundo Dunes Preserve, the last remaining sand dunes in Los Angeles, still marked by the […]
*not pictured My version of this film begins with the establishing shot in the same manner as Désirée’s. I pan over downtown Los Angeles. I try to skip the normative sunset, smog-ambitious, clichéd photographs of the city. I am not focusing on anything in particular. I am not overly concerned with landmarks, not interested […]
Daido Moriyama I feel bad saying this, and you will have to read on to find more positive suggestions about this book, but I think Moriyama has become quite a pastiche of his earlier glory. I understand how he arrives at that conclusion, and frankly, most people will likely be inclined to argue with […]
Robert Flick’s career is exciting. Born in Holland in 1939, the artist emigrated to North America by the 1960s and had work featured in publications as early as 1966. He has been exhibiting since the 1960s, and his work is featured in many institutions; yet, he is not easily placed in any respective movement, […]
I am incredibly biased as I write this. I share a close connection with the artist Pieter Hugo through our Nearest Truth workshop programming. Although it might seem counterintuitive to the points I will raise subsequently, I have had a chance to hear Pieter talk about his work in detail, with all the challenging […]
What can be said other than Thank You?
“After people live awhile in a place to which they’ve laid waste, it gets to be easy to hate a great many things. Including themselves. And anything green that tries to rise again.” Robert Adams “There is another world and it is in this one.” Paul Éluard There have been few post-war American photographers, if […]
“I hear the sound of victory. I hear the sound of victory. I hear the sound of victory”. 1976, the centenary-a procrastinator’s wet dream” The kids are smiling, their bodies are interlaced within the disused tire mound and the coyote snarls staring dead-eyed and hungry from the top of the bare picnic table. He […]
History generally presents itself to the future in visual terms that signify the distance between the two points of time from its creation and its re-purposing and its re-examination. The fallacy in photographic terms of historical representation and its distribution of intent are intertwined between reason and audience over the passing of linear […]
Join us as we visit the internationally praised, multifaceted artist Sterling Ruby in his Los Angeles studio. In this video, you can watch the American artist at work and hear about his approach to art: “I like the idea that what I’m doing is an abstraction of something I am experiencing in real life, but […]
Los Angeles artist Sterling Ruby first exhibited his monumental urethane sculptures as part of MOCA Focus: Sterling Ruby, SUPERMAX 2008, an energetic show of painting, collage and sculpture. MOCA visits the artist in his studio for an exclusive look into his process. Born in 1972, on Bitburg Air Base, Germany, and raised in rural Pennsylvania, […]