Davidson reveals a lush and exotic Los Angeles beyond the urban sprawl

In 2008, Bruce Davidson, who had already photographed New York and Paris, began exploring Los Angeles with a focus on its exotic plant life. The arid climate, normally hostile to life, allows for an exceptional botanical diversity in L.A. County that reaches from the surrounding foothills and mountain wilderness to the Pacific Ocean, and Davidson quickly became a Los Angeles convert. Traffic, wealth, poverty, violence and other urban phenomena give way to valiant plant life where ivy thrives on the underside of the 405 and Glendale Freeway interchanges, and a tree in the foothills regenerates itself after a wildfire has parched its bark, he writes. Without its plant life and human respect for it, L.A. would be a vast desert void. Nature of Los Angeles 2008-2013 depicts the city in black and white, presenting its beauty and banality as emblematic of urban existence in general. Bruce Davidson (born 1933) began photographing at the age of ten in Oak Park, Illinois. He studied at the Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University before being drafted into the army. After leaving military service in 1957, he freelanced for Life and in 1958 became a member of Magnum Photos. Davidson’s work is held in many major museum collections and his awards include a Guggenheim fellowship (1962), the first National Endowment for the Arts Grant in Photography (1967) and an honorary doctorate in Fine Arts from the Corcoran College of Art and Design (2011).