{"id":1040741,"date":"2026-09-03T11:49:42","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T11:49:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/1040741\/"},"modified":"2026-09-03T11:49:42","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T11:49:42","slug":"david-lynchs-photography-brings-his-los-angeles-into-focus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/1040741\/","title":{"rendered":"David Lynch’s photography brings his Los Angeles into focus"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"et-2026-fall-preview-dropcap-O-red.png\" <\/p>\n

On any given day, David Lynch would set out from his Hollywood Hills home with his camera and a number in mind: 10 photos in five hours, say. His son, the film director Riley Sweeney Lynch, recalls him turning these excursions into a game. \u201cFor him, taking photos was like going on a treasure hunt,\u201d he said. The camera became \u201ca way into the world,\u201d another instrument for finding ideas. He\u2019d return with images of abandoned stairwells, dilapidated neon signage, Art Deco theater facades, boiler room control valves.<\/p>\n

\""Fall <\/a> <\/p>\n

The only guide you need for fall entertainment.<\/p>\n

Evidence of these wanderings arrives in L.A. this fall. Opening Sept. 19 at Pace, \u201cDavid Lynch: L.A.\u201d will bring together 35 black-and-white and color photo-based works from five series made between 1979 and 2008. The presentation is both the first devoted solely to 30 years of the filmmaker\u2019s photography practice in L.A. and the first exhibition in his adopted city since his death in 2025. \u201cI think a lot of people are going to be surprised at the intensity of the work,\u201d Pace founder Arne Glimcher said. Photography remains a lesser-known dimension of Lynch\u2019s practice, he added, though his prints possess the same \u201cirresistible strangeness\u201d found across his oeuvre.<\/p>\n

\"David <\/p>\n

David Lynch, \u201cSmoke on Couch,\u201d 1992.<\/p>\n

(The David Lynch Estate and Pace Gallery)<\/p>\n

While only one series in the exhibition features the city itself, the remaining four capture its atmosphere. In the 2016 documentary \u201cDavid Lynch: The Art Life,\u201d Lynch described the geography of his childhood in Boise, Idaho, as both tiny and inexhaustible. \u201cHuge worlds are in, you know, those two blocks. Huge,\u201d he said while thumbing through sepia-toned family photos. \u201cEverything\u2019s there. Everything.\u201d The scene kept returning to Bill Griffin, the managing partner of Pace\u2019s L.A. gallery, as he and senior director Genevieve Day organized the exhibition. For Griffin, it illuminated the way Lynch came to inhabit the city he called home for more than half a century. Within its sprawl, each adumbrated alley and plate-glass storefront could hold an entire world.<\/p>\n

\u201cLynch chose to live in L.A. for all the things this show contains,\u201d Griffin said, \u201cthe architecture, film noir, cinema, color, mystery, mood.\u201d<\/p>\n

Born in Missoula, Mont., in 1946, Lynch studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The soot-blackened Philadelphia he encountered, then in a state of urban decay, sparked his lifelong fascination with industrialism, destitution and the macabre. In 1970, he received an American Film Institute fellowship and went west. Inside the abandoned stables of Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills, he spent the next several years producing his first feature, the surreal thriller \u201cEraserhead\u201d (1977).<\/p>\n

Lynch traced his attachment to L.A. back to his first day. In \u201cCatching the Big Fish\u201d (2006), he remembers arriving after dark and stepping out of a small apartment on San Vicente Boulevard the following morning: \u201cI saw this light,\u201d he wrote. \u201cAnd it thrilled my soul. I feel lucky to live with that light.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"David <\/p>\n

David Lynch, untitled (Los Angeles), 1979.<\/p>\n

(The David Lynch Estate and Pace Gallery)<\/p>\n

Lynch\u2019s affection for the city and its singular luminance emanates from the intimate prints documenting its otherwise overlooked corners. In \u201cUntitled (Los Angeles)\u201d (1979), a tiered, skyscraper chandelier casts a flower of white light across a coffered ceiling. Another untitled 11-by-14-inch print from 1979 records the fire-burnished remains of the looping Thrifty sign above a Westwood drugstore. Lynch\u2019s own explanation of the image was characteristically laconic: \u201cThere\u2019d been a fire, and so I took that picture.\u201d For Day, these photographs feel \u201chopeful, especially as compared to the bleakness of his earlier Philadelphia images, but also daunting.\u201d A desire to reveal something just beneath the visible surface is manifest throughout, from the chiaroscuro studies of marble elevator banks to empty stairwells that spiral out of sight.<\/p>\n

Although the photographs share the unnerving intensity characteristic of his films, Lynch understood the two disciplines as distinct. \u201cFor him, the medium offered the opportunity to linger on a single image,\u201d said Los Angeles County Museum of Art curator Britt Salvesen. \u201cFreed from narrative, sound and movement, his photographs indulge our desire to look longer and more intently than politeness would normally permit.\u201d<\/p>\n

Griffin similarly sees \u201can ocean inside every one of David\u2019s works.\u201d The exhibition, he argued, will reward viewers willing to slow themselves down; those who do may \u201ccome out different.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the three series centered on women\u2019s bodies, prolonged looking verges on the voyeuristic. Women\u2019s faces fill the frames of five warmly lit photographs, their red-lacquered lips parted to release silky streams of smoke. The tight cropping in the monochrome nudes isolates slopes, folds, shadowed recesses and curved planes that hover between landscape and abstraction. In \u201cCouch Series #1\u201d (2008), layered negatives produce a ghostly, acephalic odalisque stretched atop a white modernist chaise and bifurcated by a trembling black line. The blurry double exposure evokes both his early experimental film \u201cThe Alphabet\u201d (1968) and his magnum opus \u201cMulholland Drive\u201d (2001).<\/p>\n

\"David <\/p>\n

David Lynch, untitled (Nudes and Smoke), c. 1994. <\/p>\n

(The David Lynch Estate and Pace Gallery)<\/p>\n

Lynch\u2019s impulse to fragment takes a more playful, if morbid, turn in the \u201cKits.\u201d Recalling the model airplane sets he assembled as a child, he arranged a fish, a chicken and a duck as a collection of dissected parts on a tabletop, labeling it with instructions for reconstruction. \u201cPLACE FINISHED FISH IN WATER,\u201d one direction reads. \u201cWATCH YOUR FISH SWIM.\u201d In \u201cBee Board\u201d (c. 1986-87), individual bees pinned to a specimen board are assigned the names of his friends and acquaintances. The combination of text and image recurs throughout Lynch\u2019s paintings as well, where captions often make distressing narratives explicit.<\/p>\n

Across media, Griffin believes Lynch\u2019s strangeness ultimately serves a humane purpose: It returns viewers to the difficult, daunting, delicious business of being an imperfect person in an imperfect world. His work, he said, could make someone \u201cfeel human again.\u201d \u201cSometimes in our world, you can lose yourself,\u201d Griffin added. \u201cThis connects you back down to the depths, to what\u2019s true.\u201d<\/p>\n

That conviction raised the stakes as Griffin and Day assembled their first exhibition without Lynch. The two have worked with the artist since 2009, and in previous presentations he approached the conception and installation as a kind of director. His family, including Riley, helped to fill the void, advising them on how best to bring the five bodies of work into dialogue.<\/p>\n

Whatever their subject, the photographer remained tethered to his city. \u201cHe had a deep, deep love for Los Angeles,\u201d Riley said. \u201cHe would just start glowing when he would talk about it.\u201d Moving here transformed his father\u2019s life, he added. \u201cHe found himself.\u201d<\/p>\n

A wider institutional assessment of the auteur\u2019s career, which spans painting, design, music and film, is already coming into focus. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is in the early stages of preparing a retrospective and is in discussions with other museums, Salvesen said. It seems more than half a century after Lynch arrived, L.A. is still finding new ways to enter his world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On any given day, David Lynch would set out from his Hollywood Hills home with his camera and…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1040742,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5123],"tags":[416435,1582,276,2451,17719,2385,416437,313811,22184,6276,2961,224,5337,199685,1069,416436,4905,3092,6166],"class_list":["post-1040741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-bill-griffin","tag-ca","tag-california","tag-city","tag-david-lynch","tag-day","tag-film-noir","tag-first-exhibition","tag-image","tag-l-a","tag-la","tag-los-angeles","tag-losangeles","tag-lynch","tag-painting","tag-photo-based-work","tag-photograph","tag-photography","tag-series"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117206961527064623","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1040741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1040741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1040741\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1040742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1040741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1040741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1040741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}