Both Sides of Sunset: Photographing Los Angeles

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.

Review :
Defies expectations in capturing the texture of this vast suburban metropolis. 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. some of the most striking visuals to come out of the city over the past five decades. Taken together, these many angles on Los Angeles reflect the city’s complex identity and all of its gleaming facets. 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. 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. 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. Here, Los Angeles, in all its romanticism and grit, its sprawling and weird glory, light and dark, large and small, now and then. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.