Dutch American Robbert Flick gets first retrospective

Innovative urban photographer

LOS ANGELES, California - The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is hosting the first retrospective of pioneering West Coast photographer Robbert Flick. The Dutch-American hails from Amersfoort, the Netherlands, where he was born in 1939.

Running through January 9, 2005, ‘Trajectories: The Photographic Work of Robbert Flick' shows the changing face of photography, landscape, urban culture and of the geography of Los Angeles.

Flick, who also has lived in the Dutch West Indies, in the 1960s moved to British Columbia and resided in Vancouver. He later studied at USC where he has been on the faculty of the School of Fine Arts since 1976.

At the exhibit, some 80 works trace Flick's career and his progress from black-and-white landscape photos to colour digital imagery. Included are works from his years as an art student in Vancouver, and selections from his ‘Canadian Urban & Nature Studies'.

Flick systematically has been documenting the Los Angeles landscape since the mid 1970s. He works with a digital video camera mounted on the driver's side of a car. The video is edited to individual frames and then re-assembled through the computer. The images form mosaic-like, panoramic strips that describe the city streets, storefronts, traffic and people. Each 24x48 inch print contains about 300 tiny individual scenes.

Flick, who married fellow photographer, and USC alumni Susan Rankatis has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Getty Scholars Program and the National Endowment of the Arts. His publications include ‘Sequential Views' (1987) and ‘Selected Works' (1982).