This Thursday, a lecture series that I host through the Julia Dean Photo Workshops, 4 Evenings with Fine Art Photographers, will feature photographer Robbert Flick. I am very excited to present Robbert, an iconic figure in the Los Angeles photography world, who continually finds Los Angeles a source of inspiration for his work. His solo exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 2004 was a highlight in my museum going.

Increasingly dissatisfied with the single frame as “the carrier of information and the definer of context,” Robbert Flick developed a breakthrough grid format termed Sequential Views. Although he began the series using a traditional still camera, L.A. Documents marked his first experiments with digital media. Flick mounts a videocamera at a 90-degree angle in his car window to capture stills while driving through Los Angeles. These vivid color photographs are printed in large-scale grids, cataloguing the juxtaposition and fragmentation of the urban landscape. Flick explains that by “tracing these trajectories and parallel passages through Los Angeles the evolution and changing demographics of the metropolis are revealed.”

Images from Trajectories, 1997-2001

Robbert currently has work at the Stephen Cohen Gallery in CONTINUUM: A Re-Examination of the 1969 group exhibition of the same name. Continuum, which highlighted the diversity of photography in Southern California, was curated by Robert von Sternberg, and was originally mounted at the Downey Museum of Art. The show run through June 26th. He is in three additional exhibitions, Hybrids, at Avenue 50 Studio in Los Angeles, until June 6th, Over There at Muzeumm in Los Angeles through June 5th, and On the Road at Artpace San Antonio through September 5th.

Images from Sequential Views, 1979-1990

Robbert is Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California and was born in 1939 in Amersfoot, The Netherlands. He is a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellow, a Getty Scholar, a two-time National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship recipient and was awarded a COLA grant by the Cultural Affairs Department of Los Angeles. In 2004 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art organized his first major retrospective,Trajectories: The Photographic Work of Robbert Flick. Other exhibitions of his work have been held at the International Center for Photography, New York; National Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona; and the Art Institute of Chicago. Other series include L.A. Diary (1967-72), Midwest Diary (1971-76), L.A.Doubles (1976-81), L.A. Documents (1990-2001), and Illinois Series begun in 2001. He lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Images from Arena, 1977