John Humble | American, 1944 -
Humble has been photographing the city of Los Angeles since the mid 1970s, producing an incredible and luminous document of the city's urban landscape. His photographs describe, "swift changes in the built environment, particularly the often awkward and interesting juxtapositions of old and new." In 2007 his work was celebrated with the publication of A Place in the Sun and with an exhibition of the same title at the J. Paul Getty Museum.
He studied at the University of Maryland, then got drafted, and spent thirteen months in Vietnam as a medic. After he went back to college, and then got a job as a photojournalist at the Washington Post. Determined to pursue his own work, he enrolled in the graduate program of the San Francisco Art Institute. After the SFAI, Humble traveled around Europe, through the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, living in his VW van, observing and photographing an amazing variety of landscapes and cultures.
In the mid 1970s Humble moved to L.A. and began teaching and photographing the landscape, His images are made with equipment that allows for great detail and minimizes distortion; your experience of looking at one of his photographs is similar to looking through a window.
Humble's photographs are held within the collections of numerous museum collections, including: the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Center for Creative Photography, Museum of Photographic Arts, Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.