The camera Lynch carried through Los Angeles for 30 years explains every frame of his films

He arrived in Los Angeles at night. He woke to the scent of jasmine and the flat, particular light of Southern California, and he never left. For more than fifty years David Lynch (1946–2025) made work inside and out of that city — films, paintings, photography, sculpture, sound — and what runs through all of it is the same thing: not a map of Los Angeles but the feeling of it, held at a slight remove from the real.

David Lynch: LA, opening at Pace Gallery’s Los Angeles space, brings together five photographic series Lynch made between 1979 and 2008. The show makes an argument that hasn’t been put formally before: that the LA Lynch was photographing and the LA Lynch was filming were the same act of looking, carried on simultaneously across three decades.

David Lynch close-up portrait, 2016 — Photo: Msubrizi, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Wikimedia Commons)

Photography was never peripheral to Lynch’s practice. He trained as a painter before the camera found him, and his still work accumulated quietly alongside everything else — before Blue Velvet, before Twin Peaks, before Mulholland Drive. These five series run from 1979 through 2008. They are not documentation of a director at work; they are the other half of a conversation about what a place can hold.

What Lynch photographed in Los Angeles was its archetypes, not its addresses. The ingenue. The shapeshifter. The city’s simultaneous beauty and darkness. Untitled (Nudes and Smoke), from around 1994, is exemplary of the method: a psychological atmosphere rather than a scene. The subject is less the body or the light than the condition they create together — the specific unease that the city produces when you strip away its function and look at what it feels like from the inside. It is the same quality that defines the parking garage in Mulholland Drive, the slow dissolve into nightmare in Blue Velvet. Lynch was building that grammar in the darkroom while he was building it in the cutting room.

The exhibition is the first presentation of Lynch’s work in Los Angeles since his death in 2025. That it opens in the city he arrived in at night and never quite left gives it an additional weight: this is, in some sense, the show he was always making. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is in early conversations about a Lynch retrospective, in discussion with other museums; the Pace presentation provides the first formal opportunity to read his photographic body of work on its own terms, in the city it depicts.

David Lynch: LA opens at Pace Gallery Los Angeles, 1201 South La Brea Avenue, with a public reception on September 19 from 6 to 8 PM.

Tags: pace gallery, David Lynch, David Lynch: LA, LACMA, photography exhibitions