SoCal PhotoExchange

Construction I105 1993 copyright by John Humble.

I105 at I 110 Transit Lanes 2004 copyright by John Humble

I105 at the I405 Los Angeles June 1 1994 copyright by John Humble

I710 from I105 North Long Beach February 1998 copyright by John Humble

I’ve known John Humble since I was his student at Otis College of Art and Design in 2004. John’s photography focuses on American architecture. By that I do not mean monumental architecture but rather the architecture of working business districts, freeways, warehouses and road side businesses.

Here is a brief statement John has written in a bio:

I moved to Los Angeles in the summer of 1974. I intended to stay here for a year, maybe two. I’m still here.

My father was career military, so growing up, I lived in Florida, New Mexico, New York, Maryland, Illinois, Georgia, Indiana, California and Kentucky—as well as Panama, France, and Okinawa.

I studied at the University of Maryland, got drafted, and spent thirteen months in Vietnam as a medic. Went back to college, then got a job as a photojournalist at the Washington Post. Determined to pursue my own work, I enrolled in the graduate program of the San Francisco Art Institute. After the SFAI, I traveled around Europe, through the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, living in my VW van, observing and photographing an amazing variety of landscapes and cultures. After a year and a half, I traded the van for six Turkish carpets in the bazaar in Istanbul, and came home.

So, I moved to L.A. and began teaching and photographing the landscape, one of the most diverse and fascinating I have ever encountered. My images are made with equipment that allows for great detail and minimizes distortion; your experience of looking at one of my photographs should be similar to looking through a window.

Along the way, I’ve done assignments for Time, Newsweek, Life, U.S. News, Geo, Esquire, Elle, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, and Harper’s.

Most recently, I’ve been traveling around the United States, photographing the American Landscape. What a strange and wonderful and luminous experience…

By Jim McKinniss