Robert Landau

“Sunset Strip with Three Billboards (1979)”

ARTIST STATEMENT

From my vantage point some forty years after I first took a photograph of a Sunset Boulevard billboard, it seems purely by chance that any evidence of these rock ‘n’ roll works of art exists at all. Fate conspired to ensure the billboards’ legacy when my parents split up in 1969, and I moved to live with my father in his new apartment on Shoreham Drive just above Tower Records – the heart of the Sunset Strip. A somewhat reclusive sixteen-year-old, I had honed a sense of visual appreciation from a short lifetime surrounded by amazing art, both at home and at my father’s fine-art gallery. When I got my first camera, a Nikkormat, I suddenly realized photography allowed me to transform myself from an awkward bystander to a purposeful observer. I saw in the rock ‘n’ roll billboards of the Sunset Strip a vibrant art form, not something from another place and another time, set behind glass in a museum, but the pounding heart of my own generation’s culture, defined bigger than life on the street, for all to see. I could not have put it into words at that time, but I knew I wanted to capture what I was feeling. I began photographing the billboards. The Sunset Strip became my subject and my own walk-in/drive-through gallery. This work documenting the Sunset Strip became a book some 40 years later titled “Rock N Roll Billboards of the Sunset Strip” (Angel City Press, 2012) that is now about to go into its third edition, and will be the subject of an upcoming documentary.

ARTIST BIO

Robert Landau was born in Los Angeles and began photographing his native city in the mid-1960s, at first shooting street scenes in black and white. Early influences included books of photographs primarily by European street photographers from the early 20th century such as Eugene Atget and Andre Kertesz. In the early 1970s Robert, still in his teens, moved with his father, art dealer Felix Landau, to an apartment just above the Sunset Strip and became fascinated with the enormous hand-painted outdoor advertising panels depicting all of the period’s greatest rock stars that were then lining the famous boulevard. Landau quickly understood that Los Angeles, unlike Paris, was a city that demanded to be seen in color. In the L.A. urban landscape, color, more than an embellishment, is part of the subject matter. Over the decades Landau has continually trained his camera on particular aspects of this city’s unique landscape and popular culture, and has now amassed an extensive archive of imagery, a great deal of which was captured on Kodachrome transparency film. Roberts latest book, Art Deco Los Angeles (Angel City Press, 1925) derives from that archive, and captures treasures both landmarked and lost from one of the most glamorous architectural eras ever. Landau through his imagery seeks to portray a personal vision of urban elements that are one of a kind, artistic and capture the personality and spirit of an easily misunderstood city at specific periods in time.

Selected by Steven Churchill, Curator and Gallerist.