John Humble photographs Los Angeles “as if he were making a great, multifaceted portrait of someone he loved.” That line, from critic David Pagel, captures the ambition behind Manifest Destiny, which gathers decades of that attention into a single volume. Humble grew up in a military family, was drafted during the Vietnam War, worked as a photojournalist for the Washington Post, then studied at the San Francisco Art Institute. Having travelled widely in the early 1970s, he settled in Los Angeles in the summer of 1974. In 1979 he acquired a 4×5 view camera and began recording the Los Angeles locals seldom notice: buildings, roads, overpasses, the everyday fabric of the metropolis.
The book is concise but concentrated: 43 four-color plates across 56 pages, presenting a sustained look at the ordinary. Humble has written that these images “are not complex; for the most part they are quite simple, and present a set of facts which are intuitively connected by the act of putting a frame around the world.” Looking at one, he suggests, should resemble looking through a window. The large-format camera serves that metaphor exactly, letting detail accumulate evenly across the frame so that the mundane becomes precise without becoming dramatic. What distinguishes the project is its patience and its refusal of caricature; the city is neither condemned nor romanticized, only examined.
Critics noticed this. Carmine Iannoccone compared Humble’s color photographs to Brassaï’s Paris by night, saying Humble does for daytime Los Angeles what the older photographer did for the nocturnal city. Pagel described pictures finding beauty, romance and empathy “where you’d least expect it.” That measured regard, sustained over years, is what makes the sequence more than a survey of streets.
For collectors, the interest lies in the conjunction of photographer and publisher. Nazraeli Press issued Manifest Destiny as a slipcased hardcover in a limited edition of 350 numbered copies, each signed. The book’s standing rests on its own terms, as a compact, carefully considered statement by an artist whose large-scale photographs have been exhibited and collected since the 1970s and whose work is held by the Getty, LACMA, SFMOMA and the Corcoran. The pages preserve his exacting view of a city that resists easy summary.
