Black and White

Santa Fe Railroad Hospital • Boyle Heights, Los Angeles •  20" x 24" 

The Grove- Los Angeles  ©2013 Jim McHugh

 

Ramparts #1  - Los Angeles  2 panels  •  54"x 42   •  © 2013 Jim McHugh






3 recent pictures from Los Angeles

Photographing urban landscape is more portraiture than architecture. 

The original Santa Fe Railroad Hospital, a wooden structure originally built in the 1900s, burned to the ground in a terrible fire. Replaced by this poured concrete Deco Modern construction in the 1920s, the building overlooks Hollenbeck Park in Boyle Heights.  Abandoned for over 20 years, in a changing Los Angeles, it will soon be rehab-ed for residential living. 

The Grove, a much newer construction, holds all the spirit of Golden Era Hollywood. It's owner, Rick Caruso, well aware of the city's architectural legacy  sought to bring that spirit to his groundbreaking development at Fairfax and 3rd. Using black and white Polaroid, this image sets the theater in the company of its earlier Hollywood movie palace relatives like the Orpheum and Chinese theaters. 

The La Bertha is a typical pre-war Los Angeles apartment building, the surrounding palm trees planted in the 1920s. The mood is steeped in Raymond Chandler and Robert Mitchum. The neighborhood, part of the tough LAPD Ramparts Division now rapidly morphs into gentrification. Many buildings like La Bertha are disappearing in favor of luxury condominiums. Affluent K-Town. 

I rarely go out that I don't find something. There is always a new discovery offered up. 

These images are made with a 4x5 Speed Graphic camera.

Shooting with Wally Seawell's Deardorff camera

Elimu Nelson

 
I've wanted to photograph my friend, actor Elimu Nelson, for a long time. We kept setting dates, but he would have to go off to make a movie or I'd booked for another shoot. Finally in March, I made these portraits of Elimu with increasingly rare Polaroid film and my prized Deardorff, circa 1937. The camera was a gift from Silver Screen photographer Wally Seawell. Using this wonderful piece of vintage photographic machinery, Wally photographed film legends like Gregory Peck, Lana Turner, Elizabeth Taylor and Betty Davis, from the 1930s until he passed recently at the age of 90.

After we made these photographs, Elimu left for Atlanta to film "The Circle," directed by Tripp Rhame. Elimu is a true artist who is in the process of making his own films. Perhaps his drive and discipline come from his years as an athlete. He played college basketball for Syracuse, and is now an avid amateur boxer who I see regularly at Wild Card.

In 2013, Elimu landed a recurring role on Showtime's Golden Globe-winning series "House of Lies" with Don Cheadle and Kristen Bell. He also delivers a powerful performance in "Things Never Said," the award-winning indie feature that received the Special Jury Award at the Pan African Film Festival. "Things Never Said" is both written and directed by Charles Murray, and features a cast of rising stars led by Shanola Hampton (Shameless), Omari Hardwick (Sparkle) and two-time Obie Award-winner Charlayne Woodard.

I'm doing a series of portraits with Wally's camera. It's an extraordinary feeling to work with a camera that has such history. Perhaps it's like blues legend B.B. King giving you his guitar if you're a musician.

Photographing German curator Wulf Herzogenrath in 2012 at The Getty Museum
in Los Angeles with Wally Seawell's Deardorff camera

artMRKT San Francisco 2013

Timothy Yarger Fine Art presents...

JIM McHUGH
Hollywood in Black & White

Selected Polaroid Type 55 photographs of historic Los Angeles architecture made by Jim McHugh between 1993 and 2007.

"Jim McHugh captures Los Angeles 

in a simpler time.  He evokes in these

luminous, elegant photographs the 

Los Angeles of our memories."

– Barbara Isenberg, author of Conversations with Frank Gehry

I’m so pleased that Tim Yarger chose these pictures to exhibit at artMRKT in San Francisco. These particular images were printed by my good friend and master printer Michel Karman, who has printed for the Getty Museum, the Whitney, Centre Pompidou, and the Louvre Museum in Paris. These are unique, hand-made images, all on silver gelatin double-weight paper. The close collaborative relationship between myself and Michel has guided the direction of this project from the very beginning. Michel understood what I saw and made it come to life in his darkroom. Whether digital or silver prints, we have bounced creative ideas off each other for more than 20 years. 

When I'm out there shooting, often in the dark, with my large Speed Graphic and a bucket of sodium sulphate, I can't help but think of the great French photographer Eugène Atget. Like myself, he spent decades capturing the vanishing landscapes of the city where he lived. Early French photography has been a huge influence. I am always looking at the pictures of Nadar, and of course, Gustave Le Gray. 

The images that Tim selected for San Francisco are Los Angeles and Hollywood architectural gems: the El Rey Theatre, Pantages Theatre and Capitol Records, Los Altos Apartments, 4^th Street Bridge, The May Company, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Eugène Atget photograph from his turn-of-the-Century work published as Unknown Paris

                                     

Gustave Le Gray, architectural photography, circa 1850s France

artMRKT San Francisco 2013 

May 16-19 

Fort Mason Center-Festival Pavillion
Timothy Yarger Fine Art - Booth 219 & 222

Fight Night - Florentine Gardens -- Hollywood, CA.

  Fight Night at the Florentine Gardens

   The Z-340 Polaroid digital camera

Boxing pictures from Fight Night - Florentine Gardens, the Club Boxing venue in Hollywood. These photographs were made with a Polaroid Z-340 digital camera, with an on board Zink printer. The  3" x 4" prints are perfect  quick thank-yous to subjects.

The  pictures from the Z-340 were exhibited in Las Vegas at CES - 2013 as part of the Polaroid program.

Photo by Chloe McHugh - veteran boxing photog!

 CES - 2013 for POLAROID in Las Vegas  • Olsen Twins -People Magazine • mid 1990s

LAX Exhibtion - Now open to the public

Let's Get Lost... now on view at LAX

Let's Get Lost: Polaroids from the Coast, a new show of my work at Los Angeles International Airport, installed in October and is now open to the general public. Featuring a 30-year collection of photographs highlighting iconic architecture and personalities of Los Angeles and Hollywood, the exhibition will be on display in the Terminal 3 Arrivals Corridor through March 2013.

 

 

(left) Tim McGowan and Jim McHugh; (right) Scott Canty, Jim McHugh and Joe Lewis

Joe Lewis, the show's curator, is a nationally known artist, arts educator, and administrator. Lewis is presently dean of the Claire Trevor School of the Arts at UC Irvine. He has curated numerous exhibitions and performance events in the US and abroad, and is an editor and writer for many art publications and peer-reviewed journals. In his statement describing Let's Get Lost, Lewis writes:

McHugh's images of Hollywood’s stars and their habitats are permeated with intrigue and mystery; they read like historical texts. They frame perceived notions about the cavalier public face of the entertainment industry’s free-floating effervescence – a screen upon which many in the world project their own fantasies and illusions. They embody dreams about a sneak peek behind the curtain, the glittering simulacra, unimaginable power and neon riches.

The City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs is presenting Let's Get Lost at LAX in partnership with Los Angeles World Airports. The art program at LAX treats millions of travelers each year to both temporary art exhibitions and permanent public art installations.  

Scott Canty serves as the director and curator of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery and is also chief curator for the art exhibition program at LAX, and Tim McGowan is the arts manager for LAX. Both curators contributed years of tremendous experience in making this show such a success.

"Our purpose is to provide educational, entertaining, and enriching cultural experiences for the traveling public." – Tim McGowan, Los Angeles World Airports Arts Manager

My wife, interior designer Johnna McHugh, choose all of the exhibition colors. The colors are loosely based on the palette of English artist David Hockney, who has painted Los Angeles in such an iconic way.  Much gratitude goes to the painters and art installation team, who were all so painstaking in their installation of  Let's Get Lost: Polaroids From The Coast.

 

INSPIRATION: Jimmy McHugh, my grandfather, a prolific songwriter from the 1920s all the way through the 1960s,  composed "Let's Get Lost" with lyricist Frank Loesser. –  That song is the inspiration for the exhibition's title, and creates the perfect mood for a journey thru LA's past. – Many legendary artists have recorded it... Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosy, Judy Garland, Billy Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald. and, of course,  Chet Baker, who made it the pop culture jazz classic that it is today.
 

 

Thank you to these generous sponsors and good friends: 

Illumination Entertainment
The Mark Gordon Company
Innova Digital Art
Delkin Devices
Wildcard Boxing
Beale Ash Distribution
Claire Trevor School of the Arts at UC Irvine
Los Angeles Conservancy