Get lost with William Livingston’s pinhole port photographs

WILLIAM LIVINGSTON’S SSAT CONTAINER TERMINAL II

If the time of day and weather outside are just so, there is a moment  as you view William Livingston’s pinhole pictures of the Port of Long Beach when, standing before California United Terminals—two side-by-side photos of what appears to be a dark and mostly empty storage barn—you find yourself inside the exhibit, your reflection framed with the actual port and the rest of the photos (more port) behind you. It was kind of an odd-that’s-funny moment for me, if not a magical one, because the two normal, possibly unremarkable photos (which look reversed until you start playing spot the differences) were transformed into a representation of the entire exhibit.

Installed inside the quaint Jean and Charles Lane Oceanview Gallery, which overlooks—yes—the ocean, “The Art of Commerce: William Livingston’s Photographs of the Port of Long Beach” seems at home. You can almost feel the breeze off the ocean while looking at large prints like Metropolitan Stevedore Company, where the seawater looks like a soft, emerald green pool table carpet and a container ship looms in the foreground, its red-painted hull dipping below the green water. Perfectly contained and framed in the distance—nestled on the horizon between where the red paint meets the blue paint on the ship—is another ship which, although we know better, looks like a toy.

Part of the fun with “Art of Commerce”—aside from the pinhole bit; Livingston’s cameras, built by his uncle Maurice Fialkoff, look much cooler than any craft projects you may have made as a child—is this disorientation, achieved at times by the camera itself. In Orient Overseas Container Line, a truck passing beneath giant red cranes becomes something of a ghost truck (presumably blurred in part by the camera’s longer exposure time) with the natural vertical and horizontal lines of the moment (the corners and ridges of the truck and cargo containers, the angles of the cranes and even the painted lines of the street) captured in apparent motion. Everything extends with no end—as lines do by definition, you know. (Elsewhere, on Total Terminals International, mud flaps on the back of a truck reading China Shipping in all capital letters are rendered 3-D block letters by the same effect.)

For similar reasons, my favorite of the exhibit is Gerald Desmond Bridge. Pinhole cameras capture everything  in focus, and here we see a bank of rocks in the foreground and the bridge overhead, both equally sharp and—if you like rocks and bridges—beautiful in their stillness. Passing underneath the bridge is a container ship and what looks to be a tug boat—kind of hard to tell, because the shapes of the vessels are diluted into horizontal lines (much like in Orient Overseas Container Line). In a traditional photograph, these might be taken as signs of speed; in Gerald Desmond Bridge, we can assume the ship is moving, but we also know it’s not clipping through the water. I found it playful and pretty; I’m also a nerd.

But even those for whom the infrastructure of industry holds minimal aesthetic value will find plenty that is great to look at in this small show. From the displayed pinhole cameras themselves (intricate wood and metal boxes that look as though they could be from 100 years or built a week ago) to the intriguing perspective on photos like SSAT Container Terminal II, an uncropped shot of the butt end of a cargo ship 12 containers wide (attached to a monstrous, bull-sized cleat), the simple charm of “Art of Commerce” will leave you smiling by our bustling sea shore.

THE ART OF COMMERCE: WILLIAM LIVINGSTON’S PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE PORT OF LONG BEACH LONG BEACH MUSEUM OF ART | 2300 E OCEAN BLVD | LONG BEACH 90803 | LBMA.ORG | OPEN TUES-SUN 11AM-5PM | $6-7 | FRIDAYS FREE | THROUGH SEPT 28

Tags: art, Commerce, Long Beach, long beach museum of art, pinhole photos, Port of Long Beach, shipping