Inside the Frame

In Jerry McMillan’s photographs, you can feel the Los Angeles art scene of the ’60s and ’70s coalesce.

Not the milieu as it would later be mythologized—the white-walled galleries, the glossy retrospectives, the auction records—but something rawer and more provisional: a group of young painters and sculptors arriving in a new city that barely knew it had an art scene and proceeding to invent one for themselves.

McMillan died in February at his home in Pasadena, at the age of 89, having spent almost 70 years in Los Angeles. He arrived in 1957 to attend the Chouinard Art Institute with Ed Ruscha and Joe Goode, his high school pals from Oklahoma City. Their gateway to LA was a rambling turn-of-the-century house at 1818 N. New Hampshire Avenue, just north of Barnsdall Park. The rent was $60; split five ways (with Patrick Blackwell and Don Moore), each paid $12 a month. A dilapidated outbuilding served as their shared studio.

Alongside Ruscha and Goode, McMillan—all his friends called him Mac—took up painting, but he was drawn to photography for its immediacy. As the friends set about constructing new lives and careers in LA, his camera created a running record of both. Like musicians, they regarded art as a collective pursuit and an expression of lifestyle. Friendship, image making, and the local landscape were inseparable propositions.

“Oklahoma was kind of a black-and-white world, then you come to this panorama of activity,” says Ruscha. “Los Angeles just blasted us. We didn’t know what to do except grab onto it.”

A personal record of a transformative decade

The Getty Research Institute acquired McMillan’s archive in 2015. It consists of approximately 7,000 negatives, 150 contact sheets, and 375 prints, along with magazine articles, exhibition announcements, ephemera, and artworks. Taken together, it constitutes one of the most intimate and sustained documents of mid-century LA art life in existence.

Though McMillan had been documenting the lives of his Chouinard friends since their arrival, his breakout moment arrived in 1961, when Goode organized a show called War Babies at the Huysman Gallery, a short-lived space on La Cienega Boulevard across from the influential Ferus Gallery. One of the earliest racially integrated exhibitions in LA, it was a provocation from the start.

The poster depicted the four participating painters—Ed Bereal, Larry Bell, Goode, and Ron Miyashiro, all close friends from Chouinard—seated around a table draped with an American flag littered with crumbs and cigarettes (the 48-star flag used in the photo was purchased for $1 in 1961, and now resides in the McMillan archive). Each artist posed with a food or implement stereotypical to his ethnicity: Bereal, who is Black, held a slice of watermelon; Bell, Jewish, ate a bagel; Goode, Catholic, had a tin of mackerel; and Miyashiro, Japanese American, utilized chopsticks. Liberals were outraged by the deadpan deployment of stereotypes; the John Birch Society was incensed by the use of the flag as a tablecloth. “We hit ’em all,” McMillan recalled in a 2007 Getty oral history.

The iconic poster marked the beginning of a tumultuous decade in the LA art world and established McMillan as the photographer any serious local artist would call when they wanted to make a statement. In the body of work McMillan produced between roughly 1962 and 1972, one witnesses the rapid expansion of the community and its stature. A small circle of friends that started at Chouinard grew to include a range of figures who would shape LA art in decades to come: the ceramicist Ken Price, the painter and sculptor Billy Al Bengston, the light-and-space visionaries Robert Irwin and James Turrell.

Though white men largely dominated the local scene, McMillan’s archive reveals a more diverse LA than the era’s official record tends to suggest. In the images, Bereal towers over a chair in his studio, his haunting assemblage works mounted on the wall behind him. The dancer and sculptor Maren Hassinger stands before one of her wire-rope pieces in denim overalls, meeting the camera’s gaze directly. The performance artist Barbara T. Smith appears as a smiling “head on a platter,” her body hidden in a draped box, disrupting notions of female visibility.

These were not documentary glimpses. McMillan treated his subjects as both friends and collaborators. Whereas most studio photographers impose a vision on their subject—or steal glimpses of their lives—McMillan recognized what each artist wanted to project and then used the frame to magnify that identity. The fact that he rarely sought credit for his iconic images reinforces a sense of his photographs as a shared project, belonging as much to the subject as to him.

When the artist Judy Gerowitz adopted the name Judy Chicago in 1970, McMillan took her to the Main Street Gym, a Downtown LA boxing mecca. The owner only permitted them a few minutes, but that was enough time for McMillan to craft a classic shot. Chicago used the image to announce her new identity in the pages of Artforum, and it has defined her persona throughout her career.

Rooted in friendship

Some of the artists McMillan photographed became famous; others have been forgotten. Throughout, Ruscha remained his most persistent and willing subject. The pictures they made collectively are steeped in a specific trust and shared language that can only come from growing up together. Taken as a whole, they amount to an extended, collaborative self-portrait.

Several of the most recognizable Ruscha images in circulation are McMillan’s: Ruscha balancing his collection of books on his head; the tongue-in-cheek Ed Ruscha Says Goodbye to College Joys, first published in the pages of Artforum as a satirical wedding announcement; studio portraits of a shirtless Ruscha posing with his new wife, Danna, and their baby son, Eddie.

Beneath McMillan’s meticulous darkroom prints, the archive offers a rich layer of unseen outtakes. His contact sheets come alive with the sense of play and make-believe blossoming in LA. Why should actors be the only ones who get to play dress-up? McMillan photographed Ruscha in a riverboat gambler’s getup, in a tank top, wielding a bow and arrow, in a sailor’s uniform, and as a furry Easter Bunny.

“If I had a situation and could use a model like Ed, I’d ask him and he’d do it,” McMillan said. “If he wanted some pictures for some reason, I would reciprocate.” That reciprocity extended into process. When Ruscha first conceived the idea for Every Building on the Sunset Strip—a self-published 1966 book that became the first installment of a 60-year project documenting LA streetscapes—he asked McMillan to take the first round of images. “Mac walked a couple of blocks and took photos with a medium-format Mamiya,” says Ruscha. “We could immediately see that it was going to be one hell of a job, so it quickly graduated from him doing these pictures in the beginning to me getting a truck and using a motorized camera.”

The first rolls were developed in McMillan’s darkroom at 1024 N. Western Avenue, where he occupied the studio above Ruscha. His archive contains a print of Ruscha in 1966, examining the first foldout edition of a publication that continues to this day. This March, Ruscha completed his latest photographic survey of Sunset Boulevard.

McMillan was a formidable artist in his own right, pursuing a medium that would dissolve the boundary between photography and sculpture. Using the paper bag as a motif, he explored spatial relationships and tensions between two- and three-dimensional surfaces. Walter Hopps—cofounder of Ferus and LA’s most influential curator in the 1960s—mounted a solo exhibition of McMillan’s works at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1966, but the photographic images he created to promote his friends would soon eclipse his personal artwork. In 1970, McMillan joined the faculty at California State University, Northridge, where he taught photography for 23 years, influencing generations of young artists who passed through the program.

Ruscha now owns the courtyard building on Western Avenue where he and McMillan maintained studios from 1965 into the 1980s. The area has recently been revamped with high-end art galleries; in their time, it was all furniture stores. One of McMillan’s most enduring images was taken outside the building on a sunny afternoon in June 1970. McMillan was perpetually invisible, almost always behind his camera, but in this instance, he set a 10-second timer and ran to join Goode and Ruscha on the rear of the ’38 Chevy coupe that Ruscha drove from Oklahoma to California. The three boyhood friends survey the boulevard like a playground—which, for them, it was. McMillan wears a white t-shirt and his signature walrus mustache, grinning ear to ear in the sunlight.

“I felt fortunate to be included,” McMillan said in an interview for Picturing Ed, a 2004 retrospective at Craig Krull Gallery documenting his lifelong friendship with Ruscha. “All in all, those years photographing Ed and my other artist friends can only be described as just pure fun.”