Taking the streets of Los Angeles, New York and Reykjavik, Iceland, the J. Paul Getty Museum’s latest photography exhibition, “Urban Panoramas: Opie, Liao, Kim,” is an immersion in city culture.
With the urban jungle as their muse, artists Catherine Opie, Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao and Soo Kim present insightful observations of urban transportation and architecture to pose larger interpretations of identity and community.
“Each of (the artists) has chosen a specific city and really captured the rhythm and the essence and the character of that city,” said Virginia Heckert, associate curator of photographs and curator of the exhibition.
Running through June 6, the exhibition incorporates the Getty’s recently acquired works with select photographs from Opie’s “Mini-Malls” series, Liao’s “Habitat 7″ series and Kim’s “Midnight Reykjavik” series.
Catherine Opie, photography professor in the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture, examines the streets of Los Angeles through studies of the pervasive urban mini-mall.
“You don’t have a pedestrian culture here; you spend a lot of the time whizzing past these structures,” Opie said.
Shot everywhere from Venice to Koreatown in stark black-and-white 7×17-inch film negatives, Opie’s untitled prints offer haunting panoramic views of what may be any urban corner. Captured in the quiet hours just before dawn, vacant sidewalks straddle the abandoned streets in a plethora of liquor stores, nail salons and restaurant signage.
“I’ve always been really interested in how the West has been photographed, especially through the notion of panorama because the West is always about this expansive landscape. Strip malls were architecturally first developed in Los Angeles,” Opie said.
With mini-mall studies capturing Chinese and Korean characters, intermingled with Mexican restaurant ads and American street signs, Opie’s work is a testament to the diverse cultural fabric of Los Angeles.
“In my work, I’ve always focused on ideas of looking at how identity is structured,” Opie said.
Even with the anonymity of the city, Opie’s photography toys with the urban landscape’s simultaneous allowance for cultural interaction.
“(It’s a) very interesting idea of assimilation, yet still maintaining one’s cultural identity,” Opie said.
Similar juxtapositions of anonymity and community are also realized in Liao’s work, “Habitat 7,” which follows the No. 7 subway line in a visual ride from Queens to Manhattan, New York.
“This No. 7 is like a river to me. … As a photographer I follow this river and go through different communities,” Liao said.
Digitally scanning and “stitching” 10 or more negatives at a time, Liao uses digital technology to create composite images to capture detailed moments within a bustling panorama of subway riders and pedestrians. From a local produce market to the subway entrance, bodies blur in step, while other individual faces stare in frozen inquisitiveness.
“(I want) to create an atmosphere of a particular place,” Liao said.
Using photo manipulation in the form of cutting, UC Riverside alumna and photographer Soo Kim also explores notions of created atmospheres in her series, “Midnight Reykjavik.”
“I wanted to make a panorama that was comprehensive, yet dizzying at the same time ““ one that could locate you as specifically in one place that could locate you in many different places,” Kim said.
With the folklore of Iceland and the slow passage of time as her inspiration, Kim cuts and layers panoramic shots of the brightly painted Reykjavik housetops and narrow streets between Plexiglas. Taken at midnight during the summer solstice, Kim’s work examines solitary roads that lie strangely empty, and notions of time are lost in what appears to be an afternoon sun.
“Each of these photographs is cut and layered so that you see through one to the next and in some cases clear through the wall. … The shadows that the cut photographs cast give a very 3-dimensional, almost skeletal quality to the architecture and gives the viewer a sort of view into this architecture,” Heckert said.
This view within architectural spaces is the shared success of Opie, Liao and Kim, as they render the spirit of their chosen communities and further infuse character in their chosen photographic styles.
“All three of these artists with their iterations of the panoramic give us a new idea as to how artists are working today with the photographic medium and what is possible,” Heckert said.