In 1971, Ave Pildas arrived in Hollywood and found himself drawn less to the names above the entrances than to the small structures where tickets were sold. The box offices of the city’s movie palaces were conceived as miniature announcements of the opulence within, and Pildas photographed them as a sustained series. He called them bijou, the French word for jewel.
One Picture Book #96 gathers eleven duotone plates made in the early 1970s, each attending to the box office as architecture and as promise: a compact, decorated form standing between the sidewalk and the movie-going experience. The movie palaces that appeared in the 1920s made the film industry visible in the city’s built environment, and their architects treated the approach to the theater as part of the entertainment. By the time Pildas began working, that world already carried a historical charge, sustained by Hollywood’s sunlight and its Art Deco fabric. His project records not the spectacle inside but the small, ornate buildings at the edge of the street. In his account, the box office offered a preview of the interior and reflected its style, which makes these pictures as much about design and civic identity as about cinema.
The book, published by Nazraeli Press, is a hardcover volume of sixteen pages with eleven duotone plates and an original signed photograph by Pildas. The plates allow the box offices to be read as a cumulative study, while the signed photograph makes each copy a direct artifact of the photographer’s hand. The edition is limited to 500 numbered copies.
What distinguishes Bijou is its scale of attention. Pildas does not survey Hollywood broadly; he isolates a single architectural type and lets repetition and variation do the work. The box office is at once a functional object and a piece of showmanship, and the photographs hold both aspects in view. As the ninety-sixth title in Nazraeli’s One Picture Book series, the volume shows how a constrained format can support a focused body of work, making a concentrated case for the box office as a subject worth sustained attention.
