Robbert Flick is a Dutch photographer who grew up in Amersfoort, Holland. Flick studied at the University of British Columbia at Vancouver before he moved on to achieve his MFA at UCLA. He has exhibited all over the world including shows at LACMA, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the National Museum of American Art and the Smithsonian Institution in D.C. He has received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts grant, among many others.
Flick’s most current series Along Central is a compilation of photographs arranged as film in many strips to make up one large 7 or 8-foot piece. His work traverses Los Angeles in an effort to capture the topographic and technological changes in landscape. He began working in this fashion in the 1960’s “to concentrate on the conceptual and repetitive properties of landscape photography”(artnet) to cope with his alien environment in Los Angeles. Upon moving back to LA he noticed the vast differences in landscape; thus, his work has evolved into something of a study-an attempt to capture his subject matter as it is now, before further changes in landscape and technological advancement take place. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art held an exhibition of Flick’s work in 2004 called “Trajectories: The Photographic Work of Robbert Flick.” The museum showed a retrospect of Flick’s work to exhibit his photographic maturity and practice in capturing the geography of a landscape as well as his transition from film to digital. These segments provide “a physical, cultural, socio-economic and historical geography of the Los Angeles region.”
The imagery in Along Central is captured how Flick was experiencing it; by driving his car. Flick’s images are divided by the seams left between the images. In some areas this is distracting; halves of cars interrupt the what-would-be gradual flow of each strip. In other areas this aesthetic works, and may even contribute, because the subject matter is not entirely organic. There are hard lines of the buildings, and while windows and awnings don’t necessarily line up it is interesting to observe the changes in composition of one building between several images. Throughout the entire collection I can view each image and appreciate it as its own, or I can view a section of several images of the same building or same stoplight and enjoy the progression. Flick has these strips lined up so that the viewer reads them like a book. However, I think because of the seams between images along with the fact that the imagery doesn’t line up it would be much more effective and better contribute to the overall flow if he allowed the eye to move easily left to right, right to left and so on, instead of having to pause between each strip. Perhaps using the method he has is a way for the viewer to spend more time with the piece, or more obviously, to communicate order. Overall Flick’s segment work is very interesting to “read” and allows me to understand why and how certain aesthetics function within my own work.
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