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If the people whose work is treated in these pages could be simplistically divided into “photographers” and “artists,” then Darryl Curran would be counted among the most influential Los Angeles photographers of the past twenty-five years. This is so, ironically, because Curran’s ideas—not only in his work but as a teacher, critic and curator—are among the least photographic, incorporating and extending fine art approaches, techniques and traditions.

Technically a student of Robert Heinecken in the early years of the UCLA graduate program, Curran was but a year behind Heinecken as a UCLA undergrad. Rather than master and pupil, the two have shared ideas as colleagues and friends since the early sixties. Among those who have formally studied with Curran are George Blakely and Suda House, but he also has had wide influence as an indefatigable promoter of the Los Angeles scene and the common welfare of its artists. He has, for example, organized at least four important shows examining aspects of advanced Los Angeles photography and written several catalogue introductions and essays on the topic.

Curran’s own work has teetered on the brink of printmaking and sculpture for most of his career. The L.A. and Special Ethyl series of 1969 and 1970 incorporate elements of both, applying an ordered but energetic graphic design sensibility to objects with a very deliberately contrived third dimension—a one-inch deep edge. The effect is to make the works look somewhat like small canvasses, the depth allowing the artist to continue the image along the edge and beyond the two-dimensional surface (in the manner of some painters of the era).

Curran’s work of this time draws heavily on the Pop art of the l960s, which had been well-exhibited in Los Angeles by the end of the decade. There is a much more obvious cynicism in Curran’s work than we see in classic Pop, however, born of the political sensibilities that were being kindled at the time. Recurring images of an artificially heroic gas station attendant and a dreamy child—her visage purloined from the wrapper of a popular brand of toilet paper—preside over a disjointed, anachronistic world of commercial excess.