Over the last hundred years, Los Angeles has perhaps been the most filmed, photographed, storied, and advertised city in the world, mediated every which way as subject, object, foreground, background, myth and real estate. The Los Angeles that has filtered into our mind’s eye is an extroverted, sun-splashed place dotted with palms and laced with flowing freeways. We see the city from the wheel of a BMW accelerating onto an on-ramp of perpetual good news. As soon as a film director trains the camera at a stand of lofty Washingtonians, its fronds swaying against a peerlessly blue sky, we instantly know where we are. David Hockney distilled this conventional visual wisdom and transformed the cliché into art with tableaux that built on the splash in the pool, its aquamarine hues, and skies capable of dissolving solid matter into luminosity.

This is not the eye that Jim McHugh brings to his camera. He sees through his lens darkly, and evocatively, capturing a noir Los Angeles saturated with atmosphere and a hazy ambiguity. His eye prefers crepuscular light, and dawn, and it monumentalizes LA by treating buildings, even signs, as icons that create a city of stature. McHugh’s family has lived in Los Angeles for four generations, and his grandfather, the illustrious songwriter Jimmy McHugh, arrived in the city on the 20th Century Express. The grandson sees time, character and even monumentality in a city too often characterized as a capital of ephemera.

Rarely does he photograph a structure whole. The photographic purpose is not documentation, but feeling. We see parts of buildings, leaning and visually unstable, and the images engage our imagination and seem to ask for a script. He photographs signs—Felix Chevrolet, Perino’s, the Cocoanut Grove—capturing words that once were worlds of their own, to evoke times past, again engaging our imagination in storied realms. His surreal eye mystifies Los Angeles through images of structures as prosaic as oil wells silhouetted against a darkened sky, black on black. Even the Beverly Hilton, a specimen of Modernist architecture designed for clarity and simplicity, emerges with the cast of celluloid history, and the patina of an elusive glamour.