John Humble, a photographer who insightfully documented the urban landscape of Los Angeles with all of its messy contradictions, died on April 13 at the age of 81 as a result of cardiovascular issues, according to his family. For five decades, Humble focused his lens on areas of the city often overlooked or dismissed, “the oddities, absurdities, and mundane beauty of LA,” as gallerist Craig Krull, who worked with Humble for two decades, told Hyperallergic.
Born in 1944 into a military family, Humble had an itinerant childhood moving around the country. He was drafted during the Vietnam War, after which he worked as a photojournalist for the Washington Post. He received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1973, and the following year settled in Los Angeles, where he would spend the rest of his life.
Humble acquired a four-by-five large format camera in 1979 and began to chronicle everyday Los Angeles, from its industrial infrastructure of freeways and ports — “austere, monumental and empty,” as Krull notes — to the quirky intimacy of single-family homes and mom-and-pop storefronts along the city’s major arteries, like Pico and Vermont. He often captured odd but quintessentially Angeleno juxtapositions of the two, as with “5021 Felton Ave., Hawthorne” (1991), which depicts a picturesque blue and white house and a freeway mid-construction looming in the background.
“Humble’s crystal-clear pictures are not one-dimensional critiques of L.A.’s inhuman artificiality,” critic David Pagel wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 1994. “Neither are they giddy celebrations of sunshine, stardom and seduction. They reflect, instead, a deep ambivalence about the city, fusing sharp contradictions in stunning compositions.”
Though his work shares some qualities with the New Topographics movement of the 1960s and ’70s and Ed Ruscha’s photographic studies of LA before that, Humble was less interested in categorizing the various typologies of the built environment in dispassionate black-and-white images. Instead, he reflected the city as it was experienced by people who lived there; his vividly colored street scenes resemble theatrical stages upon which a few figures provide a sense of individual humanity.
Although he downplayed any political intention, he acknowledged the charged content inherent in his photographs.
“I think that there is a huge disparity in Los Angeles, as there is in the US in general, between the wealthy and the not so wealthy, the haves and the have-nots,” he told the Getty in 2012. “And so many of the areas in which I photograph are areas where there are the have-nots.”
In 2007, Humble was the subject of an exhibition at the Getty, A Place in the Sun: Photographs of Los Angeles by John Humble, and photographs of the Port of Los Angeles from his Sunday Afternoon series were recently on view at the Laguna Art Museum. His work is held in numerous museum collections, including the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Center for Creative Photography, Smithsonian Institution, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
