Postcards from the Pacific

“Malibu used to be this laid-back country horse town,” resident Shannon McKee told the Pepperdine University Graphic in 2024.

Her comment hearkens back to the first third of the twentieth century, when most of the land that is now Malibu was part of a 17,000-acre ranch. The first housing enclave, Malibu Colony (where Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and other Hollywood stars would reside), began in 1926, and the same year, records of people surfing the area waves appear. In 1929, the stretch of Pacific Coast Highway through Malibu opened.

From the 1930s and through World War II, Malibu was mostly a paradise for locals. The popularity of longboards exploded in the 1950s, aided by lighter board materials and design features that improved performance. These developments dovetailed with the Gidget craze of 1959 (a film about a Southern California girl who discovers surfing one coming-of-age summer), and long-haired hippies drove their woodies (wood-paneled cars) into town in droves. The sounds of the Beach Boys mingled with those of the ocean, and Malibu’s star ascended, luring great architects like Harry Gesner and the Getty Center’s Richard Meier. Ever more glamorous residents moved into the homes these masters designed.

Naturally, photographers followed too—they came for the surf, the sherbet-hued sunsets, and the Getty Villa, perched on a hill straddling Malibu and the Pacific Palisades. Featuring images from the Museum’s photographs collection, here is a selection of what the artists captured.

The Santa Monica–based photographer Anthony Friedkin says that this picture, one of his best known, is part of his “surfing essay,” an image-based diary about his life as a lensman and surfer. “I wanted to document what happens to surfers when they get out of the ocean,” he says. “They cross the highway. How do they live? What do they look like?... I wanted to make it completely genuine.” The rugged backdrop also reveals a more secluded Malibu than the one we know today.

The Roman-style J. Paul Getty Museum opened in 1974. Robert Shlaer’s Villa daguerreotype, one of photography’s earliest formats, was a rare choice for a modern-day artist. He worked as a professional daguerreotypist for 20 years, creating romantic and haunting documentations—which involved a portable darkroom—of the American West. Shlaer has noted that the “daguerreotype does not lend itself to modifications or advancements.” But associate curator Mazie Harris says, “daguerreotype has an incredibly uncanny level of detail, and blending contemporary refinements with early technology was a particularly fitting choice for a modern attempt to reconstruct ancient architecture.”

Neon-smeared sunsets often appear in John Divola’s work, but the way he frames them can be unexpected. In his Zuma series, Divola entered an abandoned home on Zuma Beach—dilapidated and filled with debris—to open a portal of opposition. Here, we see the vivid Malibu of postcards and movies, but it is served with an unsettling side of decay. “The ocean out the window is evocative of regenerative cycles,” Divola told VICE in 2016. “The interior is evocative of entropy. I’m interested in all that, but the photographs themselves aren’t emblems for simple reductive metaphoric intentionality.”

During the two years Divola shot here, the house was also being used by firefighters as a test site, a somber precursor to the tragic 2025 Los Angeles fires.

On January 1, 2003, Robert Weingarten began a project that lasted exactly one year. Every morning at 6:30, he took a photograph of Santa Monica Bay from the same viewpoint (his residence in Malibu) with the same camera and settings. The varying results were spectacular. Shimmering and shifting through seasons and weather, no two images were twins. “What people don’t realize is how materially different the light can be at the same time of day, at the same exact place throughout a year, especially Southern California, where they think of the light as being pretty much the same,” Weingarten told the Smithsonian Institution in 2009.

Buildings throughout LA, including these Malibu apartment complexes on stilts, feature heavily in Ed Ruscha’s work. After all, one of the artist’s many photo books is called Some Los Angeles Apartments (published in 1965).

In 2013, Getty Publications released Ed Ruscha and “Some Los Angeles Apartments.” Curator Virginia Heckert wrote in the introduction, “It is thanks to Ruscha’s having recorded these structures in 1965—and in many cases having provided the inspiration for others to photograph similar subjects—that we find ourselves today more observant and appreciative of the architecture that so unassumingly but definitively influences our experiences of the city.”

“Ritts had a love for light and location,” says curator Paul Martineau. Often, for Ritts, these loves merged with the human form in clean-lined, chiaroscuro portraits like this one. Its setting, Paradise Cove, was one of Ritts’s favorite places to shoot; he even directed Madonna’s “Cherish” video on this famous Malibu beach in 1989.

As we continue to explore neighborhoods of Los Angeles through the Getty Museum photography collection, we’re heading about 12 miles east (and slightly south). Make sure to keep an eye out for our next edition: Santa Monica. And check out our related surf-scene stories about artist Raymond Pettibon, whose influences include his coming of age in SoCal surf culture, and Harry Gesner, a surfer/architect whose iconic houses “surf” LA’s coasts and canyons.