He’s taking the long view

As a photographer and filmmaker, Larry Yust is used to working with his eyes. But the inspiration for his latest exhibition started with his teeth.

In 2001, the Hancock Park resident was experiencing post-vacation malaise after returning from a trip to Italy to shoot the canals of Venice and the ruins of Rome.

“I felt very sorry for myself because there was nothing I could shoot” in L.A., he says.

To make matters worse, his mouth was ailing him. “I had a lot of dental work, and my dentist’s office was on Crenshaw,” necessitating several trips, Yust adds.

Soon, he began noticing the streets. Where some saw primarily graffiti and blight, Yust found his next photographic passion.

“I’d look at the streets,” he says. “Then I’d come back again and photograph.”

Rising before dawn to take advantage of the early-morning light and the lack of cars, Yust started taking hundreds of photos of random streets in and around L.A. The result: “Street Seen: Photographic Elevations of Los Angeles by Larry Yust,” an exhibition of 47 urban landscapes at the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History. (It’s running concurrently with another cultural survey of the city: “Botanica Los Angeles,” five altars made by local botanica owners.)

Yust shot most of the photographic panels, measuring 1 foot high by 4 to 18 feet wide, in South Los Angeles neighborhoods, industrial areas like Vernon, along the Art Deco facades of Broadway in downtown and amid Central American neighborhoods in Koreatown.

The works incorporate hundreds of photographs pieced together to create seamless urban landscapes. Though Yust shot them on traditional film (“I never got exactly what I wanted” with digital photography, he says), Yust digitally manipulated them in Photoshop.

With their bold colors and empty streets, they can seem downright pastoral -- to a point. “Venice Boulevard, 2004,” for example, is a block of six identical bungalows sporting the same sea-blue paint. In “Beverly Boulevard, 2003,” red and green fruteria and carniceria signs compete with haphazard graffiti along storefronts and signage for a bar called One Eye Jack.

Fowler Museum director Marla Berns says she hopes visitors come away from the exhibition with a new attitude.

“You get a sense of freedom when you see the photographs,” she says.

Yust, who admits to being “as old as Clint Eastwood,” started taking photographs when he was scouting locations for movies. In the 1960s and ‘70s, he directed educational films for Encyclopaedia Britannica.

In 1998, he produced the photo book “Salvation Mountain: The Art of Leonard Knight,” about Knight’s monument of free-form designs and biblical quotations painted on the side of a desert hill in Niland, Calif. The book helped draw international attention to the work, which was named a national folk art shrine by the Folk Art Society of America.

Yust’s transition from a book about Salvation Mountain to documenting the streets of L.A. makes perfect sense, says Daniel Paul, former vice chairman for the L.A. Conservancy’s Modern Committee. It’s a dedication to preserving folk art environments.

“Larry is adept at translating objects we may not normally associate as beautiful,” Paul says.

In fact, his new book, “Metro,” applies the same photographic treatment used in “Street Seen” to graffiti-strewn Paris subway stations.

In all of his recent work, Yust has been aiming to preserve what will quickly disappear.

That’s especially true of the graffiti shown in his photographs.

“With graffiti, you have to work fast or it’s gone,” Yust says. The graffiti artists “only work at night. They have no hope of reward, or positive reward, and no hope that it will endure, and no guarantee that anyone will see it.”

So, like his graffiti-artist counterparts, Yust prefers working light: “I’m just walking around with a small camera,” he says. And in many ways, he shares an aesthetic with them: “I don’t hold color back in my work. I look for subjects that have strong colors. I get a kick out of finding beauty where you normally wouldn’t find it.

“Western Avenue is thought to be one of the ugliest streets in L.A.,” Yust says. “And I consider it beautiful.”

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‘Street Seen’

Photographic Elevations of Los Angeles by Larry Yust

Where: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, Sunset and Westwood boulevards, Westwood

When: Noon to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays, noon to 8 p.m. Thursdays

Ends: Feb. 27

Price: Free

Contact: (310) 825-4361, fowler.ucla.edu