In the late 1960s, Robbert Flick spent roughly three years photographing Los Angeles under conditions he has since made central to the work’s meaning. He kept several dozen self-rolled films in a shoebox, pulled four or five at random before going out, and left a snippet of leader on each exposed roll so it could be reused. Often he had no idea what a loaded camera held. Nazraeli Press presents that body of work as LA Diary, a volume the publisher describes as an important early project that would inform Flick’s approach to all his subsequent artistic activity.
Flick’s own account sets out the method and its stakes: he wanted to render his photographic experience of the city and to emphasize its process, so that acknowledging a moment mattered more than framing one. Multiple exposure and simultaneity drew him, alongside ideas about chance and the I Ching; he photographed this way for three years. The publisher also notes that one image on the book’s cover records an Ortiz destruction event, in which a piano was broken apart with an axe and mice were released among traps on the floor, and reads that action as an emblem of the period’s politics and of the lives and landscapes destroyed in the Vietnam War.
Nazraeli Press issues the work as a slipcased hardcover of sixty-four pages containing twenty-nine duotone plates in English. Those proportions suggest what kind of attention the project asks for: a sustained sequence drawn from three years, not a career survey. The book documents an artist working against the conventions of the single, composed urban view and treating exposure itself as a subject. The edition is limited to 350 numbered and signed copies.
Flick, born in Holland in 1939, is a Southern California artist who works primarily in photography. His work is held by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Bibliothèque Nationale and other institutions. For a collector, LA Diary belongs to the study of conceptual landscape photography and of Los Angeles as a subject; it also records an early method from which a distinctive later practice developed.
