Views From The Hollywood Hills

L.A. is a changeable city, frightening and optimistic, surreal and dopey, exotic and banal, sophisticated and naïve. It constantly throws up surprises, grabbing the photographer’s eye with some quirky or touching image.

The collaboration of Carey More, photographer, and her father, writer Julian More, continues as they explore the brilliant hard-edged facets of the bitter sweet Los Angeles scene. Carey More’s superb photographs capture the staggering variety of the landscape – city, ocean, mountain, desert, all within two hours’ freeway cruise of the Hollywood Hills. LA, city of Art Deco and neon, is a melting-pot of nationalities and styles – fairy-tale turrets on the Chateau Marmont Hotel; expensive shiny motors cruising Sunset Strip; palm trees fringing the surf on Venice Boardwalk; lush orange groves on the edge of the desert … Even in the suffocating smog and the infinity of Slurb, the featureless suburban grid, LA has irresistible glamour.

‘Dreams A Reality’ proclaims the giant billboard, siren-like, and in his succinct and witty text Julian More takes this motto as his theme. Recalling the lost-Indian civilization, the Spanish settlement and the rise of the Dream Factory, he places the City of Angels in its rich and neglected cultural context. He evokes the corrupt, sleazy city stalked by Philip Marlowe, and refers to the writings of residents and visitors as varied as Isherwood, F Scott Fitzgerald and Evelyn Waugh.

‘Views From the Hollywood Hills’, illustrated with over 100 colour and 20 black and white photographs, perfectly conveys the beauty and the vulgarity of this famous city. Together father and daughter depict the cruel allure of this unique cityscape and its eternal optimism.