Edited by Jane Brown, Marla Hamburg Kennedy. Text by David Ulin, Ed Ruscha.
The city as muse: Los Angeles in pictures, from Lee Friedlander to Ed Templeton
Los Angeles is a city of dualities—sunshine and noir, coastline beaches and urban grit, natural beauty and suburban sprawl, the obvious and the hidden. Both Sides of Sunset: Photographing Los Angeles reveals these dualities and more, in images captured by master photographers such as Bruce Davidson, Lee Friedlander, Daido Moriyama, Julius Shulman and Garry Winogrand, as well as many younger artists, among them Matthew Brandt, Katy Grannan, Alex Israel, Lise Sarfati and Ed Templeton, just to name a few. Taken together, these individual views by more than 130 artists form a collective vision of a place where myth and reality are often indistinguishable. Spinning off the highly acclaimed Looking at Los Angeles (Metropolis Books, 2005), Both Sides of Sunset presents an updated and equally unromantic vision of this beloved and scorned metropolis. In the years since the first book was published, the artistic landscape of Los Angeles has flourished and evolved. The extraordinary Getty Museum project Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980 focused global attention on the city's artistic heritage, and this interest has only continued to grow. Both Sides of Sunset showcases many of the artists featured in the original book—such as Lewis Baltz, Catherine Opie, Stephen Shore and James Welling—but also incorporates new images that portray a city that is at once unhinged and driven by irrepressible exuberance. Proceeds from the sale of the book will benefit Inner-City Arts—an oasis of learning, achievement and creativity in the heart of Los Angeles' Skid Row that brings arts education to elementary, middle and high school students.
Contributing photographers and artists are Robert Adams, Iwan Baan, John Baldessari, Lewis Baltz, Sara Jane Boyers, Tim Bradley, Matthew Brandt, Charles Brittin, Mauren Brodbeck, Michael Butler, Craig Carlson, Oscar Castillo, Sam Comen, Kevin Cooley, Zoe Crosher, Bruce Davidson, Raymond Depardon, Tomas T. Diaz, Jeff Divine, John Divola, Mitch Dobrowner, David Drebin, Mitch Epstein, Elliott Erwitt, Dennis Feldman, Christina Fernandez, Larry Fink, Rose-Lynn Fisher, Robbert Flick, Lee Friedlander, Ron Galella, Harry Gamboa Jr., Niccolo Gandolfi, Bruce Gilden, Jim Goldberg, Katy Grannan, Bob Gruen, Nolan Hall, Karen Halverson, Grant Hatfield, Alexandra Hedison, Anthony Hernandez, Todd Hido, Stephen Hilger, Josef Hoflehner, Hugh Holland, Peter Holzhauer, Dennis Hopper, Bettina Hubby, John Humble, Martin Hyers and William Mebane Alex Israel, Graciela Iturbide, Steve Kahn, Yoko Kanayama, Dennis Keeley, Veronika Kellndorfer, Lisa Kereszi, Douglas Kirkland, Brandon Lattu, Gary Leonard, Michael Light, Dan Lopez, Alex MacLean, Florian Maier-Aichen, David Maisel, Steve McCurry, Susan Meiselas, Philip Melnick, Joel Meyerowitz, Zoran Milosavljevic, Daido Moriyama, Sarah Morris, Grant Mudford, Karin Apollonia Müller, Warren Neidich, Steven Nilsson, Jane O’Neal, Catherine Opie, Eric Orr, Bill Owens, Ed Panar, John Pfahl, George Porcari, Matthew Porter, Alex Prager, Marvin Rand, Bill Ray, Lara Jo Regan, Doug Rickard, Jennifer Robbins, Ed Ruscha, Mark Ruwedel, Sarah Sackner, Lise Sarfati, Lynn Saville, Ferdinando Scianna, Denise Scott Brown, Allan Sekula, Craig Semetko, Michael Shields, Stephen Shore, Julius Shulman, Nicolas Silberfaden, Mike Slack, SPOT, Randi Steinberger, Dennis Stock, Tim Street-Porter, Larry Sultan, Mark Swope, George Tate, Deanna Templeton, Ed Templeton, Ben Tierney, Tseng Kwong-Chi, John Valadez, Camilo José Vergara, Ellen von Unwerth, Nick Waplington, Julian Wasser, Bruce Weber, James Welling, Henry Wessel, Garry Winogrand, Steve Winter and Amir Zaki.
Featured image is Alex Prager's "1:18 p.m. Silverlake Drive" (2012).
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Metropolis Magazine
The Editors
I like the democracy of this book. It treats all the images as necessary for the whole; there are no stars or hierarchy. From the ocean to the burbs, inside cars, behind sunglasses, and from a bird's eye view, the facades and the faded glory are all here in pictures, not fighting for attention, but hand in hand becoming a whole. This whole doesn't have a "The End" moment and it has another side of the street to look at.
Josh Klinghoffer
Being the first Californian in my family and visiting the east coast frequently, I've always had tricky relationship with this city that birthed me. I feel like as I flip through the following pages I'll have the kind of experience we all hope to when looking at a piece of work...a very emotional one.
Bookforum
Chistopher Lyon
Affinities emerge: Josef Hoflehner's startling 2010 shot of a plane seemingly parked in the sky above an In-N-Out Burger closely follows Zoe Crosher's series of distant passenger jets photographed through dismal motel-room windows.
Modern Luxury
Laura Eckstein Jones
Following the success of 2005's highly acclaimed Looking at Los Angeles, Metropolis Book's new tome highlights the City of Angels and pinpoints its many dualities (lush, natural beauty vs. harsh urban stretches; crowded beaches vs. vacant hillsides) through compelling photography taken over the past few decades.
Elle Decor
Peter Terzian
With nearly 300 images by some of the world's leading photographers, the book is a kaleidoscopic look at a complex, ever-nchanting locale of dreams and despair.
Los Angeles Times
Carolina A. Miranda
This makes "Both Sides" all about the images — which makes it a wonderful book with which to revel in the wild architecture, the burned-out rocker types, the overpowering roadways, the singular street life, the sublime ridiculosity.
Architectural Digest
Mayer Rus
Both Sides of Sunset: Photographing Los Angeles presents one of the more nuanced odes to L.A.—the good, the bad, and the ugly freeways.
Vogue.com
Rebecca Bengal
Here, Los Angeles, in all its romanticism and grit, its sprawling and weird glory, light and dark, large and small, now and then.
The New Yorker, Photo Booth
David L. Ulin
It’s an insider’s view, a portrait of Los Angeles in a series of discrete mirrors: a city, as it ever was, in the process of becoming, making coherence out of chaos, ineluctable and revealing at once.
American Suburb X
Owen Campbell
It’s a rich book, too large and too diverse to neatly summarize, but it has more soul than just a “survey” of Los Angeles photography.
Los Angeles Times
Carolina Miranda
No overview of Los Angeles is ever going to be complete. Our city is too big, too atomized, too much of everything all at once. All we can ever see is one tiny big of it at a time. And this book offers plenty of wondrous bits.
Time, Lightbox
Lucia De Stefani
Taken together, these many angles on Los Angeles reflect the city’s complex identity and all of its gleaming facets.
Dazed
Ashleigh Kane
some of the most striking visuals to come out of the city over the past five decades.
The New York Times
Luc Sante
Decades fold together and famous pictures flow along peaceably with their lesser-known relatives in a continuously unrolling and emphatically horizontal visual narrative that feels cinematic...You close the cover having had an adventure.
Art Ltd.
George Melrod
Defies expectations in capturing the texture of this vast suburban metropolis.
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Martin Hyers and William Mebane's "HERE – 77070019" (2010) is reproduced from Both Sides of Sunset, Metropolis Books' gorgeously unromantic composite portrait of the city of Los Angeles, featuring work by more than 125 photographers. Reviewed in the New York Times Book Review this weekend, it's one of our top Holiday Gift Books for Photography Collectors this year. Contributing photographer and Foreword author Ed Ruscha writes, "As far as I’m concerned, this collection would give the Los Angeles newbie or hardened local something to chew on. It’s like seeing a good movie about your own town that takes you into its zone, surrounds and overwhelms you with stimuli, and gives you a face-slapping double take."
continue to blog
"Los Angeles is a city where one story, where the only story, is never enough," David L. Ulin writes in his Introduction to Both Sides of Sunset, Metropolis Books' best-selling anthology of Los Angeles photographs, launching tonight at Hamburg Kennedy in New York. "Cognitive dissonance? Possibly… although I prefer to imagine it in terms of Keats' negative capability, which F. Scott Fitzgerald defined as 'the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time.' That is what Los Angeles means to me, what it finally taught me: that it is not standing against or for the archetype, but accepting both the archetype and everything else. City of sprawl, city of neighborhoods. City of wealth and poverty, celebrity and anonymity, 'a city no worse than others,' as Raymond Chandler once described it, 'a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.'" Featured image is Mauren Brodbeck's "Untitled Urbanscape 17" (2004). continue to blog
Both Sides of Sunset "finds consistency, or at least a through line, in the fragments, makes a case to frame the city as a whole," David L. Ulin writes in his Introduction to Both Sides of Sunset, currently accompanied by an exhibition at Hamburg Kennedy gallery in New York. "Again, the double vision: Los Angeles requires us to peer beneath the surface, even as the surface continues to beguile. We are always zooming in and out, adjusting focus, looking for the larger story in the smaller, the smaller story in the larger, recalibrating our sense of place here, our relationship to the landscape and what it does or does not mean." Bruce Davidson's "Untitled" (2012) is reproduced from the book. continue to blog
"Girls in Traditional Mexican Dresses, Olvera Street" (2004) is by Ed Templeton, who will appear at MOCA Grand Street, Los Angeles, today at 3PM, in conversation with fellow Both Sides of Sunset contributors, Zoe Crosher, Bettina Hubby and Michael Shields. The panel will be moderated by the Los Angeles Times'David L. Ulin, who writes that Both Sides of Sunset "finds consistency or at least a through line, in the fragments, makes a case to frame the city a s a whole... Los Angeles requires us to peer beneath the surface, even as the surface continues to beguile. We are always zooming in and out, adjusting focus, looking for the larger story in the smaller, the smaller story in the larger, recalibrating our sense of place here, our relationship to the landscape and what it does or does not mean." Join us this afternoon to celebrate the most interesting book of Los Angeles photography in many years, followed by a signing. continue to blog
Dennis Stock's "Venice Beach Rock Festival" (1968) is reproduced from Both Sides of Sunset , the most compelling collection of Los Angeles photographs in recent history and a featured title at our bookstore at Paris Photo Los Angeles. Essayist David L. Ulin writes, "There is much in L.A. that is not meaningful—at least not on the terms we’ve been taught. Both Sides of Sunset, however, defies us not to shift our thinking, not to refract the city through a different lens... What do we do with such photos, such locations? How to integrate them into a coherent sense of place? The answer is that we do and don’t, the puzzle of Los Angeles played out in every interaction, every time we go into its vast cacophony. Archetypes and their opposite, the tension to which I keep returning, the one I’ve never quite resolved. Still, here perhaps, or so these images appear to tell us, they are becoming (in their own elusive fashion) reconciled." continue to blog
Ellen von Unwerth's early 90s photograph, "Sunset Boulevard," is reproduced from Both Sides of Sunset, Metropolis Books' critically acclaimed collective portrait of the city of Los Angeles, featured this week in the Los Angeles Times. Presenting work by more than 125 photographers, Both Sides of Sunset captures "a postwar Los Angeles of extremes and dualities - sunshine and noir, natural beauty and urban grit, tract homes and iconic midcentury architecture, valleys and hillsides," according to Jane Brown and Marla Hamburg Kennedy, the book's editors (and progenitors of the 2005 classic, Looking at Los Angeles, now long out-of-print). Join us in celebrating this surprising new historical survey with an exhibition and signing this Thursday, June 18 at Hamburg Kennedy gallery in New York. continue to blog
Join ARTBOOK | D.A.P.,Metropolis Books and Glendale's Brand Library on Thursday, November 12 from 7 - 9 PM for Los Angeles Between Two Covers: On Creating a Collective Vision of the City, a panel discussion about the making of Metropolis' acclaimed photography book, Both Sides of Sunset. Panelists include editor Jane Brown, Los Angeles Times book critic and author David L. Ulin, and art director Lorraine Wild. Refreshments and book signing to follow. continue to blog
Join us at MOCA Los Angeles Saturday, June 27 at 3PM for a book launch and panel in celebration of Both Sides of Sunset: Photographing Los Angeles, published by Metropolis Books. Los Angeles-based photographer-artists Zoe Crosher, Bettina Hubby, Michael Shields, and Ed Templeton will share their distinct visions of the city’s visual landscape in conversation with David L. Ulin of the Los Angeles Times. continue to blog
In his Foreword, contributor Ed Ruscha writes, "This book had to be done if only for the kaleidoscopic references to its subject. New vistas are at every off-ramp. Is there a way to portray Los Angeles that hasn't already been seen? The answer is not a negative: There is always another view, as this book evidences with both gravity and levity. The city, as well as the artist's perspective, is always changing. I'll bet anyone turning these pages will fall deep into a Los Angeles they didn't expect." continue to blog
Scroll down for more information about this historical book event, and to see 6 limited edition Both Sides of Sunset prints produced exclusively for the fair! continue to blog
Published by Metropolis Books. Edited by Jane Brown, Marla Hamburg Kennedy. Text by David Ulin, Ed Ruscha.
The city as muse: Los Angeles in pictures, from Lee Friedlander to Ed Templeton
Los Angeles is a city of dualities—sunshine and noir, coastline beaches and urban grit, natural beauty and suburban sprawl, the obvious and the hidden. Both Sides of Sunset: Photographing Los Angeles reveals these dualities and more, in images captured by master photographers such as Bruce Davidson, Lee Friedlander, Daido Moriyama, Julius Shulman and Garry Winogrand, as well as many younger artists, among them Matthew Brandt, Katy Grannan, Alex Israel, Lise Sarfati and Ed Templeton, just to name a few. Taken together, these individual views by more than 130 artists form a collective vision of a place where myth and reality are often indistinguishable. Spinning off the highly acclaimed Looking at Los Angeles (Metropolis Books, 2005), Both Sides of Sunset presents an updated and equally unromantic vision of this beloved and scorned metropolis. In the years since the first book was published, the artistic landscape of Los Angeles has flourished and evolved. The extraordinary Getty Museum project Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980 focused global attention on the city's artistic heritage, and this interest has only continued to grow. Both Sides of Sunset showcases many of the artists featured in the original book—such as Lewis Baltz, Catherine Opie, Stephen Shore and James Welling—but also incorporates new images that portray a city that is at once unhinged and driven by irrepressible exuberance. Proceeds from the sale of the book will benefit Inner-City Arts—an oasis of learning, achievement and creativity in the heart of Los Angeles' Skid Row that brings arts education to elementary, middle and high school students.
