This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in L.A. Photographs
The Huntington Library
Ends September 15
The Huntington Library’s photography exhibit, This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in L.A. Photographs, ends this week, timed perfectly with the close of another L.A. summer. In the show’s last week, you can go to the secluded botanical paradise of the many gardens at the Huntington before getting all thoughtful about the depiction of your complicated hometown in film over the last hundred and forty odd years.
Since 1860, both the physical landscape of the region, as well as the physical nature and awareness of the people living there, has been captured in celluloid. This photography attends to the complexities of the South Land, a place that any Los Angelino must feel bittersweet about. One must learn quickly in LA the difference between appearances and reality, an aphorism that the show’s photography points to. True, L.A. is the nation’s capital for fame, success, leisure, and glamour, but is also home to racial tensions, merciless traffic, and unfulfilled dreams. The photographs in the show represent the physicality of this binary that makes Los Angeles so alluring, yet somehow treacherous.
An interesting prologue to the show in the galleries is the outdoor series “Edit Nine†by Allan Sekula, created for the Huntington. The nearly narrative group of photographs is dedicated to Louis Adamic, a labor activist whose autobiography Laughing in the Jungle points to this ambiguous double nature of L.A. as a haven in image, but unforgiving in fact. The photographs are arranged in the gardens between the two galleries which the This Side of Paradise exhibit is housed, incorporating the open-air landscape into the white cube of the museum.
Aside from all of that analytical talk, the Huntington Library has a lot of simple and simply beautiful sights to enjoy on these last summer days. If you prefer something a little more straightforward, there are plenty of sculptural cacti and succulents along the garden paths, and over 15,000 kinds of plants and flowers over 120 acres. If you plan ahead and make reservations, you can lunch at the famed Rose Garden Tea Room at the center of the botanical gardens.
Photo by Ava A.
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