ALAN KROEBER: ETERNAL HOLLYWOOD

November 8th-December 3rd, 2008


2121 San Fernando Road Suite 3
Los Angeles, CA 90065
Tel 323.223.6867
drkrmgallery@gmail.com
Tue-Sat 11-5 Sun 1-4

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ALAN KROEBER Muse of Dance, Hollywood Bowl
16"x20" Silver gelatin print

Opening reception for the artist:
Saturday, November 8th, from 4 to 7pm

Alan Kroeber’s photographs present the power of Hollywood’s urban landscape, a power which deepens with time. The tension between grit and glamour is caught on black and white film, using a vintage Nikon F2 camera. His images represent the physical reality of Hollywood, the city, seeking to evoke its look and feel from the multiple points of view of a movie buff, a film noir fan, and a resident of the workaday town where real people still live.

He captures Hollywood’s history and dreams made real in avenues and buildings and palm trees and the sheen of reflection in plate glass, with a dark undertone in textured cloudscapes and the poetry of shadows- The Ennis House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1924, portrayed in the midst of its recently completed restoration - The fabled corner of Hollywood and Vine, reflected in the windows of the old Broadway department store, now converted to luxury housing - Faces of classic movie stars as they gaze out from publicity portraits onto today’s refracting boulevard from the windows of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel - The delicacy of a garden reflected in the window of a Spanish Colonial mansion - Even the soaring concrete mass of a freeway onramp, seeming to emerge from the land itself like an ancient icon whose birth is now a mystery.

Like the architecture of the city itself, the images are layered in a visual archeology, and the interplay among these layers invites the viewer to remember and dream – by reclaiming history, to become new again. In these photographs, Hollywood is a place which eternally recreates itself, where the poignancy and intensity of the past and present are overlaid on one another, where you feel the creation of the future in every moment.

Born into a family of academics and writers in Berkeley, Alan Kroeber moved with his family to Eagle Rock at the age of seven where he grew up and graduated from high school and Occidental College. He has been a resident of Hollywood for more than sixteen years. Kroeber’s photographs have been featured in a variety of local venues, including The Mystery Bookstore in Westwood and The ArcLight Cinemas in Hollywood, and are held in a number of private collections.



ARTIST STATEMENT

Photographs are my language of observation, my effort to evoke the world. And all language is learned from people we know. My father is a retired professor of history, and his father was a cultural anthropologist. My mother is an artist whose creations have included hand-made copper-enameled jewelry and gorgeous weavings. Their ideas showed me how cultures affect one another, how the actions of an individual or group resonate through time. They taught me that what we create reminds us of who we are: what we protect and honor defines us.

Each of these people has influenced how I shoot pictures.

This exhibit is dedicated to them and to Robert Nudelman (1956-2008), who fought passionately to conserve the physical structure and spiritual essence of Hollywood. Without his accomplishments many of my images would not exist, because their subjects would have been destroyed.

“There is a sense in which memory is more persuasive than actuality: there are times when I see not what is, but rather what used to be. In Los Angeles, as in all great cities, the past and present are overlaid, informing one another in an archeology of the spirit. There are layers, seen and unseen, to every neighborhood, every block in the city. Each of us inhabits a private reality of interpenetrating memories and dreams, a realm of reminiscence and possibility where the past has carved the present as the present is now sculpting the future. This process astonishes me and opens my heart.”

Alan Kroeber
November 2008

Eternal Hollywood website

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