The solo exhibition of George Porcari’s photographic collages opened last Saturday and runs through February 20th at West LA’s Haphazard. Porcari’s work covers fifty years of photography, a montage of Los Angeles images that conveys the feel, as much as the look, of the city.
Porcari, above, describes his approach to the exhibition as “non-conceptual. Rather than have a typical kind of exhibit that’s conceptual, I just wanted to have photos that let people look at the city that we all inhabit, that make you start thinking about your place in the city.”
Directly behind Porcari is a photograph taken in Redondo Beach in 1995. “I was using disposable cameras then, I was really into hard diagonals,” he explains. “Disposables really flatten things out. I took that in a gas station. I love taking pictures in gas stations. They’re classic LA places, pit stops, as it were, for people on the move. For five minutes, you have human contact, and you’re not alone on the street. People get out in these little oases before they move on. They’re good places to take photos, because people briefly let their guard down.”
From his massive collection, Porcari choose what he felt were good photos, and, as he puts it “a hybrid of my best work that said something about the city, that spoke to the city in some way.”
Many of Porcari’s images have a quality that freezes a moment in time, makes it immortal.
Evocative rather than explanatory, Porcari’s work is a must-see look at the City of Angels that once was, never was, and always will be.
- Genie Davis; all photos by Jack Burke