A Brief History Of L.A.'s Billboard Art

Dec 6
08:37

2012

Ramyasadasivam

Ramyasadasivam

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Photographer Robert Landau inherited artiness from his father, who ran a fine-art gallery in Los Angeles and favored German and Austrian expressionism in particular.

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As a teenager in the 1970s,A Brief History Of L.A.'s Billboard Art Articles though, Landau favored something else. Oil Portrait

The Sunset Strip was his playground, and in his eyes, art was all around. Oil Portraits

"When I went out to explore the world," he says on the phone, "I felt the Strip was like a gallery; there were these hand-painted works of art on the street." 

What he's referring to, though, are billboards: Not necessarily what most would consider "art" — at least not by contemporary standards.

"They looked like giant art pieces that kind of represented my generation and the music I listened to," he says.

Landau was 16 when he started pointing a Kodachrome-loaded camera at larger-than-life icons hanging over L.A.'s streets — the Beatles crossing Abbey Road, Linda Ronstadt in roller skates. At the time, he explains, music billboards were relatively new to L.A.

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