Queer Lens on Los Angeles: Artists’ POV

Los Angeles native Anthony Friedkin has been documenting the social landscape through in-depth photo essays for over 45 years. By using his camera as a means of personal discovery, his full frame black & white photographs explore the many layers of reality. Friedkin’s photography has been recognized internationally. His work is included in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum, MoMA in New York, LACMA, and the George Eastman House in Rochester. His photographs have been published in Japan, Russia, Europe and many fine art magazines in America. He received a National Endowment of the Arts grant in 1977 and was given a special commendation by Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley for his contribution to Fine Art Photography in 1980.

Catherine Opie’s subjects have included early seminal portraits of the LGBTQ+ community, the architecture of Los Angeles’ freeway system, mansions in Beverly Hills, Midwestern icehouses, high school football players, California surfers, and abstract landscapes of National Parks, among others. Merging conceptual and documentary styles, she creates pieces relating to sexual identity; to the relationship between the individual and the space they inhabit; and to the tensions between the constructed American dream and the diverse realities of its citizens. She was a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow recipient and the Robert Mapplethorpe Resident in Photography at the American Academy in Rome for 2021. She has exhibited at such venues as the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Photographer’s Gallery in London, MoCA Chicago, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Reynaldo Rivera was born in Mexicali, Mexico and grew up traveling throughout Mexico and the US—mostly between San Diego de la Unión, Mexico, Los Angeles, and Stockton, California. His large (and largely unseen) body of work captures queer clubs in Los Angeles in the 1980s and '90s as well as house party scenes. Part of Rivera’s project, as he digs through his archive, is remembering and lending visibility to a whole community of vibrant trans women and drag performers who often died young. The project is also a representation of a Los Angeles that has all but disappeared: Echo Park as a predominantly Latinx neighborhood rife with artists, writers, and performers full of flare and queer glamour, reminding us that LA is a place with a deep history and a short memory. Rivera has exhibited his work at Reena Spaulings gallery, Los Angeles, and has been published in Granta. In 2020 Semiotext(e) published a monograph of his work, Reynaldo Rivera: Provisional Notes for a Disappeared City.

Ryan Linkof is senior curator at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. Previously, he served as part of the founding curatorial team of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and as a curator in the photography department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. His research, teaching, and exhibitions explore the intersection of art and mass media, queer histories, and histories of film. He is the co-author of Queer Lens: A History of Photography and contributor to numerous books, exhibition catalogues, and scholarly journals. He holds a BA from UC Berkeley and a PhD from the University of Southern California, where he has also served as a visiting professor.