To deliver these capsules of time, McHugh resorts to an older technology, he photographs with a vintage 30s Speed Graphic Camera made famous by camera noir legend Weegee. He shoots various types of Polaroid films; prints are often frayed at the edges, faded and discolored, as though they’ve just been exhumed from a box unopened for decades.

McHugh specializes in the city hiding in plain sight—the Wilshire corridor, and parts of Hollywood and Downtown, where Los Angeles is a city rather than suburb. His establishing shots are the Art Deco department stores along Wilshire and LA’s pre-War mid-rise apartment buildings, all crested with a name—the Los Altos, the Lido, the Ravenswood. Collectively this group of images establishes an armature of elegance and urbanity that was once perhaps the rule but now escapes our modern consciousness: it’s not the narrative we live here today. His lens, however, is not sentimental, and he also avoids seeing Los Angeles for the leveling forces of Pop culture. Counter intuitively, his shots verticalize a horizontal town, making it tall and solid rather than flat and insubstantial. But always under a big sky, as though on a screen in a drive-in movie theater. He does not photograph the city in motion, but at rest, as a place to be rather than as a place through which to drive.

His eye chooses to see a more heroic Los Angeles, when the buildings and the signs were the larger-than-life stars of a city that seemed built within an architectural studio system, when Wilshire Boulevard was a mile of miracles. A city that is today still understood as open, spacious and insouciant acquires instead the emotional density of a sky of ominous clouds that lightning will soon crack open. His grandfather may have written “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” but the grandson prefers the shadows of the shady side, and strays into the dramatically charged, emotionally tense aesthetic neighborhoods occupied by Hitchock, Orson Welles and Raymond Chandler. In his evocative and provocative ensemble of photographs, what emerges is not only a unique portrait of a well-known city, but also a photographic vision of a city that is completely original, McHugh’s own.

Joseph Giovannini writes on art and architecture for the New York Times. He is also an architect who is often featured in Architectural Digest.