Du point de vue photographique, l’exposition Los Angeles 1955-1985 présente l’intérêt de couvrir une période de profonds bouleversements des usages qui s’étend notamment de la publication des Américains de Robert Frank à la reconnaissance institutionnelle (et commerciale) des qualités artistiques du médium. Parce qu’elle s’intéresse principalement à l’usage que les artistes font d’un procédé alors « mineur », l’exposition présente, par rapport à la photographie, un paradoxe intéressant : proposer un panorama de la scène artistique de Los Angeles, en ne figurant quasiment pas cette ville.

For Wallace Berman, photography was both an intermediate step in the creation of his Verifax Collages and an element of his magazine Semina. This ability to produce and reproduce allowed him to combine images and also to disseminate them easily. It was this second property that also motivated Eleanor Antin when she sent the stories of her character 100 Boots to figures in the art world in the form of postcards. For most artists, photography is predominantly used in a naive way, considered a trivial document. Combined with texts and other elements, it served Douglas Huebler to illustrate the concepts of his Duration pieces, as well as performance artists to keep track of their actions. Even Robert Heineken, who transparently combined advertisements and war images on the pages of a magazine, worked mainly on their literal side. Only Baldessari explores the relationship between his work and photography in greater depth. Initially producing hybrid painting/photography objects (Econ-o-wash, 1966-68) that raise questions about their status, he then turns his attention to the question of meaning. He then exhausted the combinatorial possibilities of four images (Story with 24 Versions, 1974) and worked on Hollywood stereotypes (Kiss/Panic, 1984).

While Christopher Williams explores the medium from within in his series on JFK, Baldessari approaches it from the outside. It is therefore only natural that he should combine photography and painting as materials for his work [1]. In any case, these artists do not concern themselves with mastering the process. Apart from Edmund Teske, who plays with the physical properties of the medium by altering it through solarization in the name of an almost alchemical conception of photography, it is rarely used for its aesthetic qualities. It is not until Steven Arnold's baroque self-portraits that we find a certain fetishistic relationship with photography through the attention paid to all stages of the process. The influence of cinema on this work is quite significant, and Hollywood certainly plays a role in the content of the rest of the photographs, which fall into two main categories: setting and action.

The images by Judy Fiskin, Ed Ruscha, John Divola, and James Welling, perhaps because they are the only ones made, even indirectly, by photographers, are rare representations of Los Angeles. But, as Catherine Grenier points out, “in all these images, the city appears as a pure scenographic backdrop, fascinating in its combination of banality and strangeness” [2]. It is therefore the generic aspect that prevails in these images. Apart from Welling, who almost makes his series of architectural photographs disappear through his dramatic use of chiaroscuro, the shots are fairly impersonal. The inventory produces fairly unspecific urban images that are striking mainly for their graphic qualities. Rusha's series 34 Parking Lots and Fiskin's series Stucco, which uses overexposure to accentuate the contrast in these tiny images of buildings, are good examples of this. The frontal nature of the shots, which can also be seen in Divola's series Los Angeles Airport Noise Abatement Zone, LAX NAZ, further accentuates the scenographic aspect of these photographs. In this latter work, which focuses on the traces left by past occupations, the city of Los Angeles plays only a background role. It also plays an undifferentiated role in performance photographs, in which it is most often absent or pushed into the background, as in the caricatural identity photos of the Chicano community by the ASCO collective.

The images by Judy Fiskin, Ed Ruscha, John Divola, and James Welling, perhaps because they are the only ones made, even indirectly, by photographers, are rare representations of Los Angeles. But, as Catherine Grenier points out, “in all these images, the city appears as a pure scenographic backdrop, fascinating in its combination of banality and strangeness” [2]. It is therefore the generic aspect that prevails in these images. Apart from Welling, who almost makes his series of architectural photographs disappear through his dramatic use of chiaroscuro, the shots are fairly impersonal. The inventory produces fairly unspecific urban images that are striking mainly for their graphic qualities. Rusha's series 34 Parking Lots and Fiskin's series Stucco, which uses overexposure to accentuate the contrast in these tiny images of buildings, are good examples of this. The frontal nature of the shots, which can also be seen in Divola's series Los Angeles Airport Noise Abatement Zone, LAX NAZ, further accentuates the scenographic aspect of these photographs. In this latter work, which focuses on the traces left by past occupations, the city of Los Angeles plays only a background role. It also plays an undifferentiated role in performance photographs, in which it is most often absent or pushed into the background, as in the caricatural identity photos of the Chicano community by the ASCO collective.

Action, as opposed to setting, is the other major category of images in the exhibition. Photography is thus called upon to reconstruct a performance in sequence form in Rachel Rosenthal's The Arousing. It functions as a mode of instruction for Allan Kaprow's happenings and Mike Kelley's objects/sculptures. It is a relic in Chris Burden's violent actions. Understood as “transparent,” it always bears witness to an event that has taken place, even if it lacked a climax, such as Allen Ruppersberg's Al's Cafe. Only Bas Jan Ader's multi-part performance In Search of the Miraculous works with evocation rather than literalness.

Between the setting and the action, there is therefore no intermediate space that combines the city and the activities of those who live there. In Allan Sekula's Untitled Slide Sequence, which shows an aerospace factory exit in the form of a slideshow, the workers are more of a labor force than individuals populating a street scene. The space devoted to “street photography” is conspicuously absent from this exhibition, which nevertheless uses Dennis Hopper's Double Standard photograph as its poster. This image, which shows a gas station taken from inside a car, is the only one that refers to a subjective and direct practice that was nevertheless extremely widespread at the time (Winogrand, among others, lived in L.A.). The absence of this type of photography in this ambitious undertaking, which aims to construct the identity of a heterogeneous artistic scene by relating it to a city, ultimately gives the impression that the L.A. exhibition has not reached the stage of the mirror.