Pico Boulevard begins in Santa Monica between two luxury beachfront hotels and ends at the Coca-Cola bottling plant on Central Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. John Humble photographed this single street as a cross-section of the city, moving east through West L.A.’s Japanese and Iranian neighborhoods, then Rancho Park, Century City, South Robertson, Mid-City, Koreatown, Pico Union, and the Garment District. In his own description, the boulevard is “a veritable microcosm of Los Angeles.” The book presents thirteen four-color plates that hold that premise in view.
Humble’s relationship to the city is long and deliberate. After a childhood spent moving between military bases, a Vietnam-era draft, work as a photojournalist for the Washington Post, and graduate study at the San Francisco Art Institute, he settled in Los Angeles in 1974. When he acquired a 4×5 view camera in 1979, he began photographing the ordinary city around him—the Los Angeles tourists seldom see and locals seldom notice. His large-scale photographs have been exhibited and collected since the 1970s and are held by institutions including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Nazraeli Press publishes the book as number 24 in the second series of One Picture Book Two: a hardcover volume of sixteen pages with thirteen four-color plates and one original signed photograph, limited to 500 numbered copies. The compact format suits a subject that is a single street rather than a monument; the book presents an established photographer’s systematic portrait of his adopted city, and it does so within an ongoing series that treats the photobook as a concentrated form.
By taking one boulevard as its subject, Pico Boulevard sidesteps the panoramic view. What emerges is a portrait of a city through a single corridor, a route that carries immigrant and established communities, wealth and precarity, in close succession. For readers attuned to Los Angeles, to large-format color description, or to Nazraeli’s series, this is a focused and considered addition.
