Rarity 16.8/100 · Collector 0/100 · Deal 10.96/100 · Listings: 2 · Avg price: $324.86 · Min price: $300.00

These scores use the legacy monthly asking-price aggregate. They do not use the new exact-edition, condition, completeness, and destination-shipping rules.

In 1964, Esquire sent Bruce Davidson to Los Angeles on assignment. The resulting photographs, however, were rejected by the magazine, and Davidson returned home with a box of prints that remained put away. Published by Steidl in 2015, Los Angeles 1964 brings that body of work together in a concise 56-page volume, giving book form to an encounter between a photographer and a city whose surfaces he found both seductive and estranging.

Davidson’s Los Angeles is defined through sharply observed particulars: immense palms at the airport, a hamburger ordered through a drive-in speaker, brilliant freeways, the Pacific reflected in chrome bumpers, troubled air, and figures on the Sunset Strip who appeared almost mannequin-like. Elsewhere, residents water an arid landscape with evident optimism. These details register the city’s peculiar conjunction of spectacle, consumption, mobility, environmental unease, and the determined fabrication of ease.

Working with a Leica, Davidson approached strangers and photographed quickly, framing and focusing before the moment dissolved. His own account stresses the alienation and cynicism he perceived, but the pictures were also bound to discovery: he described the trip as an awakening in his visual understanding. The work is therefore not simply a descriptive record of Los Angeles social life in 1964. It also preserves the tension between documentary attention and the photographer’s unsettled, subjective response.

For a collector, the book’s importance lies in this concentrated meeting of place, method, and editorial history. Its compact scale keeps the original assignment legible while allowing the photographs to stand apart from the commission that produced them. Los Angeles 1964 offers a historically situated portrait of the city and a focused view of Davidson testing how fleeting encounters, commercial surfaces, and civic mythology could be transformed into photographic form.