This Is The City

To the roll call of masters of documentary photography--Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Weegee--must now be added the names Leon C. Driver, someone known only as Munns, and yet another identified only by the enigmatic initials R.R. Los Angeles Police Department photographers all, toiling in near-total anonymity, recording with a dispassionate eye the flotsam and jetsam of L.A.’s underworld: cops, perps, victims, witnesses, crime scenes--”evidence” that was promptly swallowed up in cardboard boxes, more than 1,000 of them, and buried in the City Records Center. Lost, ignored, unremarked. Until now.

Echo Park’s vest-pocket Fototeka Gallery has lined its walls with “To Protect and Serve: The LAPD Archives--100 Years of Photography,” a distillation of thousands of negatives that gallery co-owners (and husband and wife) Merrick Morton and Robin Blackman pored through, aided by LAPD Sgt. John Thomas and Los Angeles County Museum of Art associate curator of photography Tim Wride, among others.

Thomas estimates that 90% of the negatives recorded the same dreary items: “Dead body, homicide scene. But then you get a shot, maybe a wide angle of a crime scene, that has a lot in it.”

That’s an understatement, as the photographs on these pages prove. These selected images hold their own with the best documentary photographs. They have an eerie ability to reverse time, reanimate the long dead, transport us to the dim, airless rooms or the cruddy vacant lots and spittle-flecked sidewalks where a human being’s final, unfathomable drama has been acted out.

The show focuses on work from the 1920s through the 1960s. The era’s large-format negatives (some as big as 4-by-5 inches, as opposed to today’s standard of 35 millimeters, or about 1.35 inches), slow film speeds and cannon-sized lenses produced super-detailed images that insist upon close inspection. In the show’s best photographs, a story seems to mutter behind time’s wall, filled with all the visual twists of a Raymond Chandler novel: bullet holes in a grinning portrait; the bag-of-dirty-clothes sprawl of a corpse; a burglar’s insouciant signature. The photos, many of which were staged for obvious PR purposes, also trace the LAPD’s evolving self-image--from Roaring ‘20s dandies to postwar paramilitary praetorians. Almost all of the cops in the older photos are white, male and jut-jawed.

Morton’s day job--still photographer on Hollywood shoots--has given him a wry appreciation of these police artists. “I did the stills for ‘L.A. Confidential.’ It’s interesting, looking at some of these scenes, when we were re-creating these type of things.” One sees the progenitors of “Chinatown,” “Sunset Blvd.,” “Dragnet.” On and on, a river of images. And here, arrayed across Fototeka Gallery’s walls until Sept. 30, are its headwaters.