La Brea Ave Los Angeles California Street Art Photography & Hot Dogs Seizer Stephen Shore Pinks

Street Art by Seizer on La Brea Ave in Los Angeles Cali

Stephen Shore's La Brea - An Image That Changed Photography


Forty years ago Stephen Shore created the image below on the corner of Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles. Almost immediatley this image along with dozens more from Shore's collection, began reshaping people's perception of the American landscape. It has been included in dozens of text books, lectures and surveys of photography.

Shore was a pioneer of color photography and along side William Eggleston, their work helped to legitimized color photography in the art world. When Shore was only 23, he became the first living photographer to have a solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Artin New York City. Shore's images have been a major influence to many well known American photographers including Nan Goldin and Joel Sternfeld. His images, thanks to the help of Bernd and Hilla Becher, even influenced many German photographers includingThomas Struth and Andreas Gursky.
See also American Pioneers of Color Stephen Shore, Joel Meyerowitz, William Eggleston ...

Today, La Brea is the conceptual core behind the La Brea Matrix Project, hosted bySchaden.com, Cologne and The Lapis Press, Culver City. In responce to La Brea, LBMP hosted an artist-in-residence program here in Los Angeles in 2009 and 2010. A collection of six German art photographers were invited to "come search for photographic points of reference to this iconic picture". The end result, a limited eddition portfolio of the artists work created while in Los Angeles and later, an exhibition.

The La Brea Matrix photographers include: 

Jens Liebchen (Berlin, born in 1970)
Max Regenberg (Cologne, born in 1951)
Oliver Sieber (Düsseldorf, born in 1966)
Olaf Unverzart (Munich, born in 1972)
Robert Voit (Munich, born in 1969) and
Janko Woltersmann (Hanover, born in 1967).