Wholesale Karen Halverson: Mulholland

Photographer Karen Halverson first fell in love with Mulholland Drive after seeing David Hockney's, twenty-foot long painting, "Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A few years after that, she moved to Los Angeles and encountered the real Mulholland Drive, a road that twists and turns for fifty-two miles along the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains from the Pacific Ocean to Hollywood. She likens the drive, which she has made hundreds of times, to "watching a movie full of jump cuts... There you are maneuvering the curves of the road while spectacular images roll by left and right. Mind the turns and the oncoming cars, but catch the views as best you can—native chaparral followed by swaths of hot pink groundcover, arching succulents that look like saxophones, sheared off hillsides, limos cruising along, movie sets and construction sites, houses on stilts, even houses perched on precipices, finally the iconic Hollywood sign, and everywhere, the vast city below." Her panoramic photographs of this legendary road show the breathtaking natural landscape that is now inextricably entwined with the built environment. Mulholland presents a unique portrait of this quintessential American city, in a dramatic horizontal format that emphasizes the wild terrain that lies beneath the glamorous City of Angels.