West Hollywood Gets Its Close-Up

As Pride Month arrives in all its rainbow-bedecked glory, we aptly kick off a new series featuring neighborhoods in and around Los Angeles. West Hollywood, or WeHo, as it is affectionately nicknamed, is often considered the symbolic epicenter of LGBTQ+ life in LA.

The series, told through the lens of Getty’s photographs collection, will explore key neighborhoods through their historical development, socioeconomic and cultural diversity, and other defining characteristics.

Suitably, WeHo can take pride in more than just queer empowerment. From the Sunset Strip to studios where stars are born to a continuous stream of civic engagement, cultural capital has long been manifested here. Now, let’s see this city within a city through some of its many iconic moments.

Lauren Greenfield is a photographer and documentary filmmaker with 84 images in the Getty Museum collection. Her slices of LA life, particularly of Hollywood, include beloved and up-and-coming actresses and pre-prom attendees, among others, and evoke a sense of glamour and aspiration. “I often look at the extremes to understand the mainstream,” Greenfield says in her 2018 film Generation Wealth, which examines modern society’s cultural obsession with fame and fortune.

This image depicts a row of deputies forming a line in front of an LA County Sheriff’s Department bus, backdropped by police brutality protesters. It was taken by George Rodriguez, who photographed Hollywood elites like Lucille Ball and Marilyn Monroe as well as the tension of a growing, diversifying LA from the 1960s onward. “The result is a compelling body of work that reveals two very distinct views of Los Angeles: life on the red carpet and life on the streets,” says Richard Ross, a board member and newsletter editor of the Los Angeles City Historical Society, in a 2021 interview about Rodriguez’s photographs. “His work is a visual record of some of the seminal episodes in the city’s history: the Sunset Strip riots of the ’60s, the Chicano movement of the early ’70s, the United Farm Workers movement, and the 1992 Los Angeles riots.”

Holly Woodlawn, the Puerto Rican transgender performer, became a “Warhol superstar” after leading roles in films like Trash (1970). And she was captured many times by celebrity photographer Greg Gorman. In this image, she poses in front of the Pussycat Theatre and its glowing marquee in West Hollywood. “I always found myself drawn to more of the outsider type people,” Gorman related in an interview conducted in conjunction with Greg Gorman: It’s Not About Me, a 2021 exhibition of his work at LA’s Fahey/Klein Gallery. “They were more interesting. They had more personality. People like John Waters, like Divine, Heidi Fleiss, for example.”

Loretta Ayeroff, a photographer working and showing in LA since the 1970s, is known for a sense of decay and detachment in her images. In Baron Gilles de Mirambeau (from The Men Series), she made a portrait of a man standing on the corner of Huntley Drive and Melrose Avenue. With the subject’s thin mustache and open shirt—plus the mix of architecture, traffic lights, and palm fronds behind him—an impression is given that we could be looking at either a movie star or a complete unknown. In a 1978 article in the Los Angeles Times, art critic William Wilson wrote, “Loretta Ayerhoff [sic] stands out from a trio of photographers because she seems to like men without harboring any illusions about them…. Miss Ayerhoff’s [sic] pictures of men seem to pull this off by simply allowing her subjects to be themselves in front of the camera.”

The Sunset Strip near the Chateau Marmont hotel is known for its cluster of huge billboards. This shot, taken from a high vantage point behind a thicket of trees, gives prominence to a billboard featuring comedian and actor Richard Pryor, who appears to peek out from the greenery. “The photograph demonstrates Mapplethorpe’s deadpan sense of humor,” says Getty Museum curator Paul Martineau. “He was certainly attracted by the amusing fact that the foliage around Pryor’s neck resembles a ruffle on a woman’s dressing gown.”

This image of California midcentury architecture is legendary photographer Julius Shulman’s most famous picture. He shot for Arts & Architecture and Architectural Digest, and the Getty Research Institute’s Julius Shulman Photography Archive contains more than 260,000 of his negatives, vintage and modern prints, and other materials. In the frame, the moment was staged with lights and two models who didn’t live in the home, echoing the movie industry it floats above. Of this performed composition, Shulman said, “It was not an architectural quote-unquote ‘photograph.’ It was a picture of a mood.’”

After an early life marked by geographical flux, John Humble settled in LA in the summer of 1974 and never looked back. The photographer was known for traveling the length and breadth of the city and interrogating “the incongruities and ironies of the Los Angeles landscape,” according to artist and curator Marié Nobematsu-Le Gassic. This image is one example of incongruous development, as the gigantic, glossy Pacific Design Center looms large behind a 1918 bungalow. “This clever juxtaposition,” says Martineau, “relies on the tension between opposites—old and new, light and dark, small and big, residential and commercial.”

As we continue to explore Los Angeles through the Getty Museum photography collection—and as summer sets its beach blanket down across Southern California—keep an eye out for our next neighborhood: Malibu.