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Age twenty-one: visit Charles Brittin’s darkroom in Venice, California. Greatly impressed, especially with the waste basket. Besides Brittin, the photographs of Edmund Teske inspire a renewed interest in photography. First “phaintings” done in Hermosa Beach (“phaintings,” inspired by photographers’ wastebaskets, are paintings with photo chemicals on photographic paper). 291, the story of Alfred Steiglitz [sic], is my constant companion during six months in jail. Wallace Berman’s Semina is eye opener.¹

The sculptor George Herms has had a strong interest in photography since the age of four, he claims; his mature work frequently incorporates photographs, whether they be found images or, as in the works shown here, photograms and photographic prints he himself has made.

As his 1977 statement above makes clear, Herms was extraordinarily attentive to the role photography played in Los Angeles art history. He credits Teske—one of the great photography experimenters—with an exemplary artistic sensibility: “The same thing people go to a bar and have cocktails for, I was getting from his photographs! If you were to look at two or three of peeling paint you would see ninety percent of my aesthetic. It’s amazing.”²

In 1963 Herms made “twelve to fifteen” relief sculptures that he titled Hymns Delite, after the photographic technique (basically a photogram) he calls by the same name. These were shown the same year at Rolf Nelson Gallery in a solo exhibition, Nativity ’63: A Joy Jump Temple of Light for Lily Belle, dedicated to the artist’s newborn daughter. Each is a worm-eaten redwood slab into which photographs and other objects are embedded, like nesting larvae—living things drawing sustenance from their hosts.

1. George Herms statement in David Trowbridge and Peggy Wade, Photographs by Southern California Painters and Sculptors (Santa Barbara, CA: University of California, Santa Barbara, 1977), n.p. ↩︎
2. George Herms, interview with the author, Los Angeles, 21 November 1991. ↩︎