The overlooked corners and “irresistible strangeness” of Los Angeles, as seen through the lens of David Lynch, will be on display starting September 19 at Pace gallery. Titled “David Lynch: L.A.,” the exhibition brings together 35 black-and-white and color photo-based works created between 1979 and 2008. This presentation marks the first time 30 years of the filmmaker’s photography practice in L.A. has been solely devoted to a show, and it is also the first exhibition in his adopted city since his death in 2025.
Lynch, known for films like "Eraserhead" and "Mulholland Drive," considered photography another “way into the world” for finding ideas. His son, film director Riley Sweeney Lynch, recalled his father setting out from his Hollywood Hills home with a camera, often aiming for ten photos in five hours. Riley described these excursions as a “treasure hunt,” resulting in images of abandoned stairwells, dilapidated neon signage, Art Deco theater facades, and boiler room control valves.
Arne Glimcher, founder of Pace, noted that photography remains a lesser-known dimension of Lynch’s work but predicted that “a lot of people are going to be surprised at the intensity of the work.” Bill Griffin, managing partner of Pace’s L.A. gallery, along with senior director Genevieve Day, organized the exhibition. Griffin believes Lynch “chose to live in L.A. for all the things this show contains: the architecture, film noir, cinema, color, mystery, mood.”
Only one series in the exhibition directly features the city itself, yet the other four series aim to capture its atmosphere. Griffin reflected on Lynch's own words from the 2016 documentary “David Lynch: The Art Life,” where the filmmaker described his childhood in Boise, Idaho, as containing “Huge worlds” within “two blocks.” Griffin found this insight illuminating for how Lynch inhabited Los Angeles, suggesting that within its sprawl, every alley and storefront could hold an entire world.
Lynch, born in Missoula, Montana, in 1946, moved west in 1970 after receiving an American Film Institute fellowship. He spent several years producing his first feature, the surreal thriller “Eraserhead,” within the abandoned stables of Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills. His attachment to Los Angeles, he wrote in "Catching the Big Fish" (2006), began on his first morning here, stepping out onto San Vicente Boulevard to see “this light,” which “thrilled my soul.” He felt “lucky to live with that light.”
This affection for the city’s unique luminosity is evident in the intimate prints that capture its often-overlooked corners. An untitled photograph from 1979 shows a tiered, skyscraper chandelier casting a flower of white light across a coffered ceiling. Another 11-by-14-inch print from the same year records the fire-burnished remains of the looping Thrifty sign above a Westwood drugstore. Lynch's concise explanation for the latter was, “There’d been a fire, and so I took that picture.” Day described these L.A. photographs as feeling “hopeful, especially as compared to the bleakness of his earlier Philadelphia images, but also daunting.” The desire to reveal something beneath the visible surface is a constant, from chiaroscuro studies of marble elevator banks to empty stairwells spiraling out of sight.
While his photographs share the unnerving intensity found in his films, Lynch saw the two mediums as distinct. Los Angeles County Museum of Art curator Britt Salvesen stated that photography “offered the opportunity to linger on a single image.” Salvesen added that, “Freed from narrative, sound and movement, his photographs indulge our desire to look longer and more intently than politeness would normally permit.” Griffin echoed this, seeing “an ocean inside every one of David’s works” and suggesting that viewers who slow down may “come out different.”
The exhibition also includes three series focusing on women’s bodies. Five warmly lit photographs feature women’s faces with red-lacquered lips releasing streams of smoke. Monochrome nudes use tight cropping to isolate shapes that hover between landscape and abstraction. In “Couch Series #1” from 2008, layered negatives create a ghostly, headless figure on a modernist chaise, bifurcated by a trembling black line, reminiscent of his early experimental film “The Alphabet” and “Mulholland Drive.”
Lynch’s impulse to fragment takes a different turn in the “Kits” series. Recalling his childhood model airplane sets, he arranged dissected parts of a fish, a chicken, and a duck on a tabletop, providing instructions for reconstruction like, “PLACE FINISHED FISH IN WATER,” and “WATCH YOUR FISH SWIM.” In “Bee Board” (circa 1986-87), individual bees pinned to a specimen board are assigned the names of his friends and acquaintances.
Griffin believes Lynch’s characteristic strangeness serves a humane purpose, returning viewers “to the difficult, daunting, delicious business of being an imperfect person in an imperfect world.” He suggested Lynch's work could make someone “feel human again,” connecting “back down to the depths, to what’s true.”
The late filmmaker David Lynch, who brought surrealist storytelling to the mainstream, has died at 78. Griffin and Day assembled this exhibition without Lynch for the first time, having worked with the artist since 2009. His family, including Riley, provided advice. Riley emphasized his father's “deep, deep love for Los Angeles,” noting that moving here transformed his father’s life and helped him “find himself.”
A broader institutional assessment of Lynch’s career, which spans painting, design, music, and film, is beginning to take shape. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is in early stages of preparing a retrospective and is in discussions with other museums, according to Salvesen. More than half a century after Lynch’s arrival in L.A., the city continues to reveal new ways to engage with his world.
