John Humble
2001
The Los Angeles River, Balboa Boulevard Bridge, Reseda
Jan Kesner Gallery
© John Humber; Courtesy Jan Kesner Gallery, Los Angeles
 
Photo Synthesis
Colin Westerbeck
 
"L.A. River Reborn" is on view at the Skirball Cultural Center through Sept. 3. (2006)
 
For an exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center, three photographers have made an extended zoom shot of the Los Angeles River. Lane Barden photographed it from a low-flying helicopter. John Humble documented it at ground level. And Anthony Hernandez waded in to get close-ups of the sodden junk afloat in the scrofulous water.
 
Something Humble said about his approach that he wanted to show the river "in a pictorial way, to make it look beautiful, which is ironic considering how ugly it is" holds true for all three photographers. Such irony serves well the recent efforts to restore the waterway, long encased in concrete as a flood-control measure, to a nearly natural habitat.
 
Humble's photographs, being a median path between Barden's heaven and Hernandez's hell, seem the most satisfying. The image above shows us the river as if it were flowing through a catacombs where it has been entombed, which, in a sense, it has.
 
[Originally published in West Magazine : June 25, 2006, p.13]
 
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