L.A.: The Unfinished Sentence

THE PHOTO at right is not spot news. Neither is it a lost-now-found record of a forgotten L.A. disaster. Rather, it documents the beginning. Long before L.A. became a breathless, run-on sentence, it was an unfinished thought, a smattering of neighborhoods yet to be connected. To see Los Angeles before its super-structure of elevated roads -- its freeways -- creates a different sort of narrative. Richard C. Miller was there to watch L.A. transform. Lucky for us, he brought his camera with him. A new show that opens next Saturday, at the Craig Krull Gallery, features Miller's six decades of work in and around Los Angeles. Many of these pieces are "snapshots" he made with his 35mm or 4-by-5 while tooling around town between his paying gigs. Miller, now 97, arrived in Los Angeles early last century and copiously documented incidental details -- parking lots, street corners, traffic lights, Good Humor Ice Cream trucks and, most dramatically, the construction of the Hollywood Freeway -- the four-level and all. Miller saved everything and we benefit from the gift of it. I'm in the midst of finishing up a piece for the Times about the show. A couple of years ago, I was lucky enough to be able to spend a good portion of the day in Calabassas with Miller and his daughter and some close artist/photographer friends. They were packing him up and moving him to New York's Hudson River Valley.
I saw stacks of prints, pillars of boxed negatives and transparencies packed into closets and beneath beds. Everything was being cleared and sent to a air-controlled vault -- blessedly. Also, since then Miller has had some work hang at the Getty and is flying back here for the gallery opening. Imagine, coming of age when L.A. came of age. Imagine, riding back-and-forth on the freeway just for the thrill of connecting the dots faster. Miller's work allows us to visualize those transitions, L.A.'s own there to here story. Arguably, connecting the dots of the city put fine punctuation on another era, a pastoral quality that so many older Angelenos recall. His work speaks to that, diagrams that complex sentence.

Show information:

Richard Miller: Over the Long Run
Vintage Carbro Prints, The Hollywood Freeway and L.A. in B/W

February 27 - April 3, 2010
Reception: February 27, 2010 4-6 PM
Bergamot Station
2525 Michigan Avenue, Building B-3
Santa Monica, California 90404
Tel: (310) 828-6410
info@craigkrullgallery.com

-- L.G.


top photo caption: "#37"
middle: The Four-Level
bottom: The Cahuenga Pass
Photo Credit: Richard C. Miller