Photographer Hunts Bright Side of Banality

Robert Landau, a photographer best known for his books “Outrageous L. A.” and “Billboard Art,” is one of those polite, soft-spoken guys who so often have a knack for finding the surreal in everyday life.

At first glance, his photographs look like pretty picture postcards of Los Angeles. But . . . well, why is Michelangelo’s David standing with a bunch of stone schoolchildren in front of a chain-link fence? And what’s Nancy Sinatra doing here, gazing waxlike at the camera and gloriously reflected in a three-way mirror?

He explains it in a typically deadpan caption: “The Greeks had mythological figures, who were immortalized in bronze. In Los Angeles, we take Nancy Sinatra and make a figure of her in wax. It’s very fleeting, this fame thing. If you were Zeus, you were a god year in and year out. If you are Nancy Sinatra, you had your turn and now it’s someone else’s.”

There is something very in these days about modest, understated young men who show the eerie beauty behind what most people dismiss as simply banal. Look at David Lynch and “Blue Velvet,” David Byrne and “True Stories.” So it’s not surprising that the San Fernando Valley Arts Council is sponsoring an exhibit of Landau’s work. The show is called “Urban Landscapes” and is at the Warner Center Art Gallery in Woodland Hills through Feb. 13.

He talked about it over lunch at Cafe ‘50s in Sherman Oaks, a bustling patch of retro-trendiness in an area where the Hughes Market across the street once was the most exciting thing around. The juxtaposition looked like something that might appear in a Robert Landau photo.

‘Homogenized’ Valley

“It’s interesting,” he said mildly over a Lumberjack burger, french fries and a chocolate malt. “I might come back and look around.” He adds, “I don’t like the corporate look of things now. A hamburger stand in the ‘50s really had a personal look. And I think the Valley is becoming more homogenized.”

Landau is 33, tall and thinnish, and can eat old-fashioned ‘50s food without worrying about dieting. He’s a natural athlete who plays softball every Saturday with a dedicated team whose co-captain is NBC’s Brandon Tartikoff. Landau is so good that he once hit a grand-slam off the scoreboard, but so self-effacing that others have to bring it up.

Some of his quirkiest pictures come from driving up and down streets to see what he can see: In the exhibit, for example, there is a striking image of a statue shop in Woodland Hills, where an ersatz, fig-leafed David stands among statues of schoolchildren, and, looming above them all, is a Paul Bunyan-sized man across the street advertising a miniature golf course.

“We really have this instant culture here,” Landau says. “I’m kind of fascinated by that. In Europe, you always see statues of some guy on a horse in a public square. Here we have a shop that sells statues for the lawn. Or Bob’s Big Boy.”

‘Personal Exploration’

He agrees that he has sort of an off-kilter way of seeing things. “Yes,” he says, finishing off his french fries, “the thing about a photograph is it takes something out of context. When you see it in real life, it’s ordinary. A photograph shows a whole other side. And I choose how to compose it. But I don’t do anything very avant-garde. Everything is very simple and straightforward. It’s more a personal exploration of things I’m interested in.”

A Los Angeles native, Landau comes from a family of art dealers--his father, in fact, gave David Hockney his first one-man show. But Landau was majoring in sociology when he became interested in photography.

“We had a choice of doing a sociology paper or a photo essay,” he recalls. “I hate to write, so I did a photo essay on the snapshot in American society. I collected snapshots out of the trash behind this photo lab . . . it showed every imaginable thing that was going on in American culture: weddings, parties, people taking a bath, going to the bathroom. I still have the album.”

Eventually, he learned how to take his own pictures and earned a degree in photography and design from California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. His work has been shown in more than 20 exhibits in America and Europe. But he still finds time to drive around town in search of the odd new image.

“Basically, you’ve got two cities here,” he notes, “Los Angeles and the Valley, and then this sort of demilitarized zone--the canyons, in the middle, where there’s coyotes and it’s like the country. The thing I like least about the Valley is all the mini malls springing up. It’s a blight. But the Valley’s still more like the image of L. A. people used to have about the rest of L. A.--wide-open spaces, relaxed streets and family neighborhoods. And a lot of that stuff is good stuff.”