Focusing on Mulholland Drive’s Split Personality

This is a familiar ride for Karen Halverson, in the passenger seat for a little trip along curvy Mulholland Drive. And in her lap rests the oversized camera she’s brought to the famed road again and again--even if it doesn’t have film in it this time, it’s here only as a prop for the portrait made of her just minutes ago.

So she’s admiring the view again, of wild brush and cactus, of cracked asphalt and real estate, through light traffic and the haze of afternoon smog. It’s a view the photographer has studied closely and repeatedly since last spring, traveling the route between Hollywood and the Pacific in search of color and contrast, and this singular layering of rugged environment and big city development.

All of it is still a bit exotic to this Easterner who settled nearby into her own hillside home just two years ago with her husband, actor Steve Gilborn, after 22 years in Manhattan. And she’s found more than can be easily contained within the wide panoramic frame of her new medium-format camera. “It’s too wild to completely tame, and yet there is this layer of civilization on it,” she says. “It seemed to me to be a place where you can see the struggle between nature and culture.”

Some of the photographs from this continuing project to document Mulholland’s split personality are on display among some of Halverson’s other landscape work at the Paul Kopeikin Gallery on La Brea Avenue through March 9. “Montana to Mulholland” is her first Los Angeles show, the latest event in a 17-year career that has moved from black-and-white street photography to her present focus on non-idealized landscape imagery.

This philosophy of presenting the American landscape as it actually appears in the late 20th Century, with campsites and telephone wires and other evidence of the human invasion, rather than as some untouched panorama, runs throughout her new work. The Mulholland pictures often incorporate the road itself, signs, concrete ditches and lampposts as important visual elements.

“I’m not really interested any more in photographing pristine landscapes,” says Halverson, who often teaches at Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design. “That’s not really where the landscape issues are, and there’s very little landscape that’s like that. I’m more interested in the ways humans alter it, the contest, the accommodation, the tension between population and landscape.”

Halverson’s first encounter with Mulholland came through a David Hockney painting of the road during a late ‘80s retrospective of the artist’s work at New York’s Metropolitan Museum. But she resisted pursuing the same location for her own work after arriving in Los Angeles, even after a couple of friends suggested she consider photographing there. To her, the street still mostly represented residential neighborhoods, movie stars and teen-age couples in parked cars.

As she found herself driving that same road in her travels across town, watching the scenery along a route that dramatically bisects the city, Halverson was soon reconsidering. “Mulholland is really not like any other street I can think of,” she explains. “It’s not like Sunset Boulevard, it’s not like Melrose, it’s not like Broadway in New York--because landscape is so much a part of it.”

Gallery owner Paul Kopeikin argues that the Mulholland photographs capture a universal theme that should inspire much more than simple regional interest. “The road is such a metaphor for everything,” Kopeikin says. “The pictures themselves are not just related to L.A. These kinds of roads are obviously all over the place.

“It was just a perfect mix of subject matter and technique. As soon as she found how that road goes and winds along, it was just perfect. This is worth photographing. You wonder why everybody hasn’t been photographing up there.”

Part of what finally sold Mulholland as a subject to Halverson was her discovery of the Fujica Panorama 617 camera, which uses standard 120mm film but produces a rectangular negative more than twice the width of most medium-format cameras.

It seemed to demand from the photographer the sort of broad vistas and divergent subject matter offered by the hills and mountains above Los Angeles.

In one image, captured between Laurel Canyon and Cahuenga Pass, a giant tangle of lush cactus erupts aimlessly, filling most of Halverson’s frame, just a few feet from an otherwise quiet residential corner. Another frames the night lights of Universal City with the trees and brush of a roadside cliff, bathed under the eerie tint of a street light that overlooks the San Fernando Valley.

Street photography was her first use of the medium, and by 1975 she was studying with such cutting-edge artists (and neighbors) as Garry Winogrand and Joel Meyerowitz. Through them she was exposed to the groundbreaking documentary work of Robert Frank, Walker Evans and Diane Arbus.

Her first major project was photographing the dense urban scenery of the New York garment district, with its crowds, furs and polyesters carted on racks, and trucks making deliveries.

“The reason that appealed to me is that it somehow enabled me to break from the need to make a picture in a formal way,” Halverson says.

That informal dynamic--and an attitude that stemmed partly from Frank’s way of seeing in new ways subjects (America’s diners, jukeboxes, flags, streetcars and the like) that had never been viewed as anything more than the mundane objects of everyday life--worked its way into Halverson’s subsequent landscape work.

Accident remains an element in her work. “I like the sense of things having happened,” she says.

So she’ll certainly be back along Mulholland, but with plans to also continue her work along some less familiar territory: the deserts, mountains, forests and prairies of California, Montana, Utah, Wyoming and elsewhere. “When I’m out there, whatever concerns I have about money or family or anything else are completely irrelevant. Mulholland is too close for that. I can be home for dinner if I’m on Mulholland.”

“Montana to Mulholland,” photographs by Karen Halverson, continues through March 9 at the Paul Kopeikin Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave. Open 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. Admission free. Call (213) 937-0765.