Get ready to rock out at the Skirball Cultural Center. The museum’s upcoming exhibit, Rock & Roll Billboards of the Sunset Strip, showcases L.A.’s historically edgy Sunset Strip at its finest. The collection features more than 20 photographs of the Strip’s historic billboards spanning almost two decades, taken by Los Angeles-based photographer Robert Landau. A coffee table book of the photos was published by Angel City Press in 2012.
“I began photographing on the Sunset Strip when I was still a teenager and living a block or so above what was then Tower Records,” Landau says. “I would see the crews from the billboard company installing new signs and hauling the old ones away. I knew then that each billboard had a limited life span, and that it would be important to photograph the ones I liked before they were gone, particularly the ones depicting the musicians whose music I was listening to.”
What began as one teenager’s hobby in 1967—capturing hand-painted, fleeting billboards—has evolved into the ultimate time travel art exhibit for the rest of us. “My main interest at that time was to document and then share the pictures through slideshows for my friends who lived in other parts of the city and never saw what I was seeing,” he says.
“I guess it led to a kind of obsession with capturing as many as I could.”
Decades later, Landau realized that his snapshots of billboards promoting bands like The Beatles, Marvin Gaye, Led Zeppelin and The Doors on their rise to legendary rock star status were more than just art.
“I first became aware of seeing the billboards more as an extension of their environment, and eventually understanding the meaning of having created this archive of what has become historic visual information,” he says. His photographs captured the essence of an era and the Sunset Strip’s rise to fame.
After a lot of hard work, Landau turned his collection of photographs into a book, available for purchase at the Skirball Cultural Center. “It only feels now that this work of art is coming to life,” he says. “The main challenge was in preserving the quality of the now-vintage and mostly color photographs—some of which date back over 40 years. Fortunately my film of choice at the time was Kodachrome transparency film, which has held up quite well over the years. The arrival of computers and digital scanners further allowed me to archive and organize my collection before it faded away. The designer of my book, Frans Evenhuis, paid homage to those old slides by showing them spread out on a lightbox inside the book’s covers.”
Rock & Roll Billboards of the Sunset Strip is a companion to another Skirball exhibit, Bill Graham and the Rock & Roll Revolution, the first comprehensive retrospective about renowned music industry manager Bill Graham (1931–1991), opening on May 7. In addition to Landau’s photographs, Billboards will also include an on-site billboard-sized mural, hand-painted by Enrique Vidal, a local artist and professional billboard painter who Landau had originally met in the 1970s. The exhibit runs March 24 through Aug. 16, and admission is free.
Photographer Robert Landau and billboard painter Enrique Vidal will give a free talk at the Skirball on April 21 at 8 p.m. Find more info and RSVP at skirball.org.