- Introduction
- CV
Larry Yust has expanded his panoramas into a new dimension: time plays an essential role in his shots of Cuban streets. They chronicle both splendor and transience in a single breath. Cuba’s history – from its independence from Spain to the American period to the revolution – is reflected in old Havana’s buildings; they lend the city its special charm and ubiquitous patina. The stories each of these houses could tell, full of character under a dramatic cloudy sky, are about both Cuba’s exciting past as well as its future.
Horst Klöver
THE STREET LEXICON
Larry Yust lives an Anglo-American tradition. Half a century ago, his father Walter Yust was publisher of the Encyclopedia Britannica; for years son Larry has dedicated himself with lexical precision to the mapping of American streets.
His aesthetically perfected elevations of several of Los Angeles’s traffic arteries and residential streets manifest in select examples what the powerful search engine Google has also attempted – to generate a comprehensive representation of the city. But with the sensitivity of a filmmaker and photo-artist he is far ahead of the internet techies. Our gaze glides down the street as in the opening sequence of Jim Jarmusch’s modern classic Down by Law. Yust’s work is an ingenious parallel to Jarmusch’s New Orleans houses, ushering us along the suburb streets and highways and into the principle of the automobile American way of life. But will this principle be thoroughly rethought in the coming years? Larry Yust’s images may in fact be visions of the future: with less traffic in one of the world’s most thrilling metropolises, our gaze may again turn to the attractions along the boulevards, which invite us to stroll and dream without traffic jams and street noise.
Horst Klöver
PHOTOGRAPHIC ELEVATIONS
The Californian Larry Yust gives his panoramas an almost exaggerated horizontality and thus casts the simultaneity of events of urban life into impressionistic genre “paintings”. In Paris to shoot a film based on a story by Ernest Hemingway, he was so taken aback by the diversity of architectural styles of the Metro stations that he decides to photograph them. The director, author and photographer Larry Yust, who lives in Los Angeles, has photographically documented the locations for his films in the past. The result was a shift to photography as an independent medium with his first museum exhibition in 1992 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Science and Industry. But walking up and down the platforms of the Parisian metro stations, he is confronted with a particular challenge. Yust wanted to photograph the stations in one piece, something he could do in film by trucking a motion picture camera along the platform, but how to do it in a still photograph? A panorama camera didn’t come into question because the distortion would be too severe. He wanted to create a photograph that one could never see in real life, where every section of the station could be seen frontally.
In 2000 when Yust bought a computer, scanner, and printer and applied himself to digital photography, he understood the solution. If he took overlapping photographs of the singular sections and then merged them together in Photoshop, he would be able to create a "Photographic Elevation", a direct elevation of each of the elongated stations that satisfy in terms of aesthetics and form and content. In 2001 Yust made his first attempts at applying the technique in Paris and it worked. He was so convinced by the results (he can capture in a single picture a view that would never be possible in reality) that he develops, as he puts it himself, an almost obsessive energy that drives him to use his method in other places – Los Angeles, Rome, or Venice, for example.
Yust’s "Photographic Elevations" can consist of ten, but sometimes over one hundred single images. One recognizes in their filmic quality that their creator has his roots in the world of moving pictures, where he by the way is still active, in spite of the success of his book Metro, where his elevations are collected and in spite of exhibitions in the United States and in the Louvre in Paris.
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