Hollywood the Unusual

Hollywood nowadays is nothing more than a pathetic slum, but in its heyday a mere seventy-five years ago it was the most marvelous place on earth, architecturally speaking.

William Taylor is a cross between Ken Murray and Julius Shulman. He sets his camera up in front of what he can’t resist calling the Moviesque architecture of Hollywood homes and buildings and apartments, has some charming people walk around (or even dance), and nice funny homemade titles between each shot.

Claes Oldenburg was born with The Brown Derby and The Freezer, the latter being evidently an ice cream stand in the shape of a two-story-tall ice cream freezer, complete with moving handle.

Edward Ruscha photographed a later generation of priceless stuff, but this you’ve never seen, these Moorish palaces and Moghul gas stations and Tudor fantasias, not even in books, unless you know the city well enough to find their vestiges literally lost in the waste land.