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

Prof. Dr. Wulf Herzogenrath - 8x10 Polaroid

Elimu Nelson

 
I made these portraits of museum curator Dr. Wulf Herzogenrath and actor Elimu Nelson with my prized Deardorff camera, circa 1937. The camera was a gift from silver screen era photographer Wally Seawell. Wally traveled the world photographing such film legends as Gregory Peck, Lana Turner, Elizabeth Taylor and Betty Davis with this 8x 10 Deardorff. My friend Wally worked as a photographer from the early 1930s until he passed at the age of 90 a few years ago.

 It's a great feeling working with a camera that has such history. It's like BB King's guitar.

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