Adam Bartos
1978
Los Angeles
RoseGallery
© Adam Bartos; Courtesy Rose Gallery
 
Photo Synthesis
Colin Westerbeck
 
"God shed His grace on thee," Katharine Lee Bates wrote in "America the Beautiful," though the line might well have been "God shine His light on thee" had Bates been present the day Adam Bartos took this picture.
 
Of course, the bright dream of an American city that the photograph offers up is circumscribed by encroaching clouds and the scruffy reality littering the foreground; the idyllic Los Angeles seen in the distance turns out to be ragged around the edges. A lot of American cities seemed to be in jeopardy this way in the 1970s.
 
Bates' anthem was inspired by a trip to the top of Pikes Peak. Bartos' photograph shows L.A. to be low and flat, like a Dutch town in a Jacob van Ruisdael landscape. Ours is not the Puritans' City on a Hill but one in a valley that is vulnerable geographically and historically. Today, however, this overcast vision looks a little dated. The doldrums in which L.A., New York and other big American cities found themselves 30 years ago eventually passed.
 
[Originally published in West Magazine : June 4, 2006, p.13]
 
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