The Los Angeles River, Balboa Boulevard Bridge, Reseda

2001

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“L.A. River Reborn” is on view at the Skirball Cultural Center through Sept. 3.

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For an exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center, three photographers have made an extended zoom shot of the Los Angeles River. Lane Barden photographed it from a low-flying helicopter. John Humble documented it at ground level. And Anthony Hernandez waded in to get close-ups of the sodden junk afloat in the scrofulous water.

Something Humble said about his approach--that he wanted to show the river “in a pictorial way, to make it look beautiful, which is ironic considering how ugly it is”--holds true for all three photographers. Such irony serves well the recent efforts to restore the waterway, long encased in concrete as a flood-control measure, to a nearly natural habitat.

Humble’s photographs, being a median path between Barden’s heaven and Hernandez’s hell, seem the most satisfying. The image above shows us the river as if it were flowing through a catacombs where it has been entombed, which, in a sense, it has.