Both Sides of Sunset : Photographing Los Angeles

The city as muse: Los Angeles in pictures, from Lee Friedlander to Ed Templeton

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. Proceeds from the sale of the book will benefit Inner-City Arts―an oasis of learning, achievement and creativity in the heart of Los Angeles' Skid Row that brings arts education to elementary, middle and high school students.

Defies expectations in capturing the texture of this vast suburban metropolis. (George Melrod Art Ltd.)

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. (Luc Sante The New York Times)

some of the most striking visuals to come out of the city over the past five decades. (Ashleigh Kane Dazed)

Taken together, these many angles on Los Angeles reflect the city’s complex identity and all of its gleaming facets. (Lucia De Stefani Time, Lightbox)

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. (Carolina Miranda Los Angeles Times)

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. (Owen Campbell American Suburb X)

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. (David L. Ulin The New Yorker, Photo Booth)

Here, Los Angeles, in all its romanticism and grit, its sprawling and weird glory, light and dark, large and small, now and then. (Rebecca Bengal Vogue.com)

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. (Mayer Rus Architectural Digest)

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. (Carolina A. Miranda Los Angeles Times)