Art, Through the Lens

Jim McHugh’s Vanishing Landscapes of Los Angeles

Jim McHugh is famous for the artist portraits, celebrity lifestyles and fine art he photographs. His images of Samuel L. Jackson, Clint Eastwood and Sir Anthony Hopkins, his unique environmental portraits for Architectural Digest covers, his comprehensive photographic survey of the Los Angeles art world, have garnered him numerous accolades and prizes. As one of the original Contributing Photographers to People Magazine when it began in the mid-70s, McHugh’s sensibility and sensitivity have served him well. Working with the Grammy Awards, he created a unique series of celebrity images and traveling exhibition for “The Grammy Image Project”, chronicling the history of contemporary music. His work is included in several prominent collections such as MOMA, the Walker Art Center and The Polaroid Collection. McHugh has published several books on Contemporary Art and Artists, including “California Painters: New Work” and “The Art of Light and Space.”

His versatility in both fine art and journalistic photography has also led him to capture ordinary things in extraordinary ways. For the past few years, Jim has focused his lens on documenting the urban ‘built environment’ as a “vanishing landscape.” Using classic Polaroid media to invoke a mythic Los Angeles, McHugh’s evocative and sizable prints hint at the glamour hidden within familiar landmarks. Moodily reflective in a film noir sort of way, his new series of works beautifully complicates how we see our city’s hotels, apartments and civic buildings. Combining analog and digital techniques to create large-format photographs of extraordinary quality, these ethereal landscapes transport us to Hollywood’s decadent early days. McHugh reveals romantic dreamscapes composed of shadows cast by stone and concrete facades under calm and menacing “L.A. Skies”.