Above image: Jane O’Neal, A&W Sunset, 1974

Both Side of Sunset: Photographing Los Angeles is a new photo book capturing the City of Angels through the lenses of greats like Bruce Davidson, Lee Friedlander, Daido Moriyama, Bruce Weber, Julius Shulman, Garry Winogrand, Matthew Brandt, Katy Grannan and Alex Israel. The tome is the second LA-centric project from Jane Brown and Marla Hamburg Kennedy (the first was the critically acclaimed Los Angeles), and presents a fresh cynosure on LA ten years on, juxtaposed with iconic shots from the 60s, 70s and 80s.

In this way, images are opposite in their subjects and compositions. Intently similar, however, in their vision to collectively expose LA for its unquestionable set of dualities – of which, sometimes, simultaneously exist in the same configuration: darkness, positivity, vitality and scenes of struggle and protest are all portrayed congruently. A graphic oxymoron. Creatively representing a city with a free-for-all melting pot of ideas, cultural signifiers and societal oppositions is no easy feat, but Both Sides smashes it.

Lewis Firth: What was the main drive behind the book?
Jane Brown: There are dozens of brilliant studies about the city, from Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies to Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, as well as novels, like Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays and John Fante’s Ask the Dust, and countless plays, works of poetry, and so on. Just as these fine books tell us something about Los Angeles through words, our aim was to tell the story through images. Our hope was to present a Los Angeles that’s unexpected, to see the city in a new way, and at the same time to embrace the city’s vibrant and singular landscape.

LF: What about the dualities that exist between the photographs?
JB: Other major cities have a unifying theme: “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere,” “the city of light” or “the windy city.” But with Los Angeles, you can’t sum it up in one tidy phrase. Perhaps it’s because there are constant underlying contractions: there’s plenty of sunshine, but just as much noir (a whole genre of film has been anchored to this trope). It’s a film-industry town, and the consequences are that lines between fact and fiction are often blurred. So as we were editing the images we found ourselves making piles of opposites: hillsides and valleys; tract homes and iconic mid-century architecture; east-side and west-side; urban and suburban; deep darkness and glaring light; illusion and reality. But we also discovered something deeper, a city that’s both easily defined and elusive, and a city that’s democratic but also horribly segregated. And for the romantic in us, Sunset Boulevard became both a geographic marker, as images run from Boyle Heights to the Pacific Ocean, as well as an imaginary line through which we projected our ideas about the city.

“It’s a film-industry town, and the consequences are that lines between fact and fiction are often blurred”

LF: So there were quite a few opposites at play. And how did you manage to bring together the varying styles of  such well-known photographers?
JB: It was very much an organic process. My partner, Marla Hamburg Kennedy, has been a photography dealer and galleriest for over 30 years, and I’ve worked in illustrated books for just about as long. So we used our respective resources to research and acquire the images. We gathered hundreds of photographs and together edited our lists, then found hundreds more, and edited again – in all it was a two-year process.  Once we finalised our selection we tried to create a narrative, albeit a sort of kaleidoscopic story, of Los Angeles through images. The unsung hero of the book is our art director, Lorraine Wild; her sequencing and placement are what gave this disparate group of images cohesion.

LF: Was it quite a collaborative process with its contributors?
JB: It depended on the artist and our needs. For some, we knew exactly which image we wanted to use and we contacted either their gallery or the artist directly. For others, like Ed Templeton, we told him about the book and he sent us some files of images that he thought would work for our purposes. Our publisher, Diana Murphy, is an architectural history genius, so she also played a key role in helping us find images.

LF: How does the book compare to Looking at Los Angeles, your other book which was released a decade ago?
JB: Before Looking at Los Angeles, there really wasn’t a photo-book on the city that wasn’t coffee-table decoration—the Los Angeles of tourist sites, the noir crime-photo collections, or the ‘LA Then and Now’ variety.  Looking at Los Angeles was the first anthology of fine-art photographers’ images of the city. It focused a great deal on landscape and architecture.  Since then there have been exhibition catalogues, like MoMA’s Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West and the Huntington’s This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in Los Angeles Photographs, as well as Jim Heimann’s Los Angeles: Portrait of a City.

We were luckily the first out of the gate for what became a sort of Los Angeles photo-book cottage industry. We thought of printing a 10-year-anniversary edition of Looking at Los Angeles, but it didn’t seem fresh, since other books had come out that included a number of the same images. And more important, the city has changed significantly over these past ten years. So we and our publisher, Metropolis Books, decided to start from scratch and to broaden our approach to include people, to include more abstract works, like John Baldessari’s Throwing Three Balls in the Air and Alex Israel’s Valet Parking.

LF: I read that the proceeds will help benefit the LA charity Inner-City Arts, can you tell me about that?
JB: Inner-City Arts is located in the heart of Skid Row and offers arts education to kids who live in the downtown and surrounding areas. We want to support Los Angeles’s next generation of artists, and in particular to help those who are the most underserved. Who knows, Inner-City Arts could produce the next Ed Ruscha or Catherine Opie.

LF: Everyone has a somewhat stereotypical opinion of LA How does this collection of photography oppose such typical notions?
JB: These photographs both embrace and challenge stereotypical opinions of A. Celebrities live and work here and you sometimes see them in your grocery store (as Ron Galella captured Julie Christie at the market – and she’s barefoot!), or at a political rally (Charles Britton’s photograph of Marlon Brando protesting). We’ve also included some publicity shots, like the New York Dolls in front of Frederick’s of Hollywood – it’s clearly a commercial photograph, but it’s a great celebration of the rock-star and of Hollywood. We featured crowded beaches, freeways, the Sunset Strip, but as David L. Ulin writes in his brilliant introduction, the Los Angeles we don’t often see “represents the little moments that make up the texture of the city, define its inner life.”

‘Both Sides of Sunset: Photographing Los Angeles’ is available to purchase from Metropolis Bookshop, here