Arnold Chanin's series "From Grauman's to the Getty," documents Los Angeles from 1961 to 2005. Since the late 1950s, Chanin has searched for elements of the city which one might ordinarily miss, frequently returning to sites in order to capture the best light or to explore different angles. Often the images highlight contrasts between old and new, modern and traditional, permanent and transitory that he finds endemic to Los Angeles.

Chanin equates his photographic series to musical compositions. He creates "visual chamber music, where each photo is a work unto itself and the entire group may be viewed as an 'opus,' like a set of quartets or sonatas, with harmony, counterpoint and variations on a theme." In "From Grauman's to the Getty," Chanin balances iconic images of Los Angeles such as Grauman's Chinese Theater with less familiar landmarks, including the Hyperion sewage reclamation plant at Playa del Rey, to provide a nuanced portrait of the city as a whole.

Chanin (b. 1934) studied art at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. He moved to Los Angeles in 1958 where he taught jewelry design and fabrication, worked as a portrait photographer, and completed his M.F.A. In 1965 he earned an M.D. from the California College of Medicine and began a career as a physician while continuing to work on artistic projects. Chanin believes that his desire to provide the viewer with an in depth understanding of a specific place through dramatically composed images links his work to the tradition of American documentary photography dating back to the 1920s, citing Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand as influences. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Orange County Museum of Art and the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

The fourteen photographs in this exhibition of "From Grauman's to the Getty" are selected from an extensive series of portfolios Arnold Chanin has generously donated to The Huntington where they join a collection of 1,640 photographs in the Art Collections. Chanin's gift also complements the hundreds of thousands of photographs in the Library's collections that illustrate the history and development of California and the West.