The Truth About Paradise
1. When I saw Larry Sultan’s photograph of a woman in curlers in the press material for the exhibition “This Side of Paradise,” I thought, “Is this what we look like?!” My reaction is more telling than I care to admit. First, I didn’t know it was Sultan’s photograph, and I feel I should have. Second, it suggests that I consider myself belonging to a place that, truthfully, I don’t identify with.
2. “This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in L.A. Photographs,” on view this past summer at the Huntington, was organized around seven unifying themes to help one understand what is perhaps the most conflicted metropolis in the United States. In her catalog essay, exhibition curator Jennifer Watts asks, “How does one comprehend as large and disorienting and, in many ways, exceptional a place as Los Angeles?” Watts and her cocurator, Claudia Bohn-Spector, assembled in nonchronological order 288 works dating from about 1862 to the present by over one hundred artists who—incorporating the body, the landscape, or both—have all photographed Los Angeles.
The themes—Garden, Move, Work, Play, Dwell, Clash, and Dream—served one the way neighborhood demarcations on a city map might help to orient the outsider. Or one could ignore them, as I did, and lose oneself in the complexities of associating one photograph with the next. The choice of whom to include in any museum exhibition is always calculated, too often in favor of the power patron/dealer supporting the institution. In “Paradise” those selections were intentionally more egalitarian than usual; Garry Winogrand and Gary Leonard were both on the checklist. “It was a balancing act,” said Watts. “We knew there would be photographs one expected to see. At the same time we wanted to recognize the range of people who have contributed to the visual narrative of Los Angeles. . .”
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