"Let’s Get Lost" - An Overview
Acclaimed photographer Jim McHugh has artfully recorded this now faded Los Angeles in "Let’s Get Lost" – a traveling photographic exhibit of beautiful photographic prints that evoke the heady days of the 1930s and 1940s. The Deco-Moderne apartment buildings and hotels, studios and historic landmarks that all make up Let’s Get Lost tell of those who came with dreams of stardom and fame; sometimes achieved, often not. The fading glamour of these architectural dowagers recalls a vanished moment in time
when Hollywood’s stars were larger than life.
"Let’s Get Lost" also features programmatic architecture that gives Los Angeles such a unique flavor. Iconic images of Randy’s Donuts, The Dog & Cat Hospital, and Felix Chevrolet bring to life a city built on a naive idealism that characterized the times.
Art critic for The New York Times, Joseph Giovannini, wrote the following of McHugh’s work: “He sees through his lens darkly and evocatively, capturing a noir Los Angeles saturated with light, and dawn, and it monumentalizes LA by treating buildings, even signs that create a city of stature... 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... when Wilshire Boulevard was a mile of miracles.”
Far more than a journey to the “forgotten side” of Hollywood, "Let's Get Lost" is a record of places torn down in the name of progress. The famed Coconut Grove, Perino’s Super Club; the arabesque lines of the exotic Beverly Theater; the Ambassador Hotel, home to the city’s transient population of well-heeled fortune seekers – these are just a few of the places McHugh’s lens has recorded that no longer exist. And so, Let’s Get Lost is far more than a vivid account of a colorful time past. In many cases McHugh’s photographs are the final images preserving that which has been lost by a city marching to modernity.