Robert Landau (b. 1953, Los Angeles) | Photographer and Author
Robert Landau grew up in the Hollywood Hills, surrounded by art from the start. His father, Felix Landau, ran the Felix Landau Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard — one of Los Angeles's pioneering exhibition spaces, showing important California and European artists throughout the 1950s and '60s. In the mid-1960s, when Robert was a teenager, he went to live with his father in an apartment above the Tower Records store on the Sunset Strip. He picked up a camera and started shooting the giant hand-painted rock and roll billboards that lined the boulevard below. Nobody else was documenting them systematically. That early work became the foundation of a five-decade career photographing the Los Angeles urban landscape.
Education
Landau studied photography at the California Institute of the Arts, graduating with a BFA in 1976.
Professional Background
After CalArts, Landau began working as a freelance photojournalist, taking newspaper, magazine, and book assignments. He was aligned with the pioneering West Coast photo agency Westlight (now part of Getty Images). He also worked on staff with travel journalist and PBS producer Peter Greenberg, shooting stills for several episodes of the Royal Tour series, including programs with Jordan's King Abdullah II, presidents of Mexico and Ecuador, and the prime ministers of New Zealand and Jamaica. His photographs have appeared in America Photo, Forbes, GEO, Horizon, Interview, InStyle, Newsweek, Time, Vogue, GQ, and numerous international publications. He has cited André Kertész and Brassaï — European documentarians of the Paris street scene — as formative influences on his approach to urban landscape photography.
Books
Landau has authored six books:
Art Deco Los Angeles, Angel City Press, 2025 (with a foreword by architectural historian Alan Hess and book design by Frans Evenhuis; published in collaboration with the Los Angeles Public Library to coincide with the centennial of the 1925 Paris Exposition)
Rock 'N' Roll Billboards of the Sunset Strip, Angel City Press, 2012 (now in its 3rd printing)
Hollywood Poolside, Angel City Press, 1997
Airstream, Peregrine Smith Books, 1986
Outrageous L.A., Chronicle Books, 1984
Billboard Art, Chronicle Books, 1980
Exhibitions
The touring exhibition Rock 'N' Roll Billboards of the Sunset Strip, organized by Photographic Traveling Exhibitions (Los Angeles), has been shown at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, the Arlington Museum of Art in Texas, and the Vero Beach Museum of Art in Florida, where it was extended through September 2024 after breaking the museum's summer attendance records. The exhibition comprises 50 photographs, four presented at monumental scale. The tour remains active.
Additional museum exhibitions include the American Advertising Museum (Portland), Arco Center for Visual Arts (Los Angeles), Bartlesville Museum (Oklahoma), the Getty's Pacific Standard Time (Los Angeles), High Desert Museum (Yucca Valley), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the National Theatre (London).
Permanent Collections and Installations
Landau's work is in the permanent collection of the Oakland Museum and is on permanent display at LAX's Tom Bradley International Terminal. In 2025, ten large-format prints from the Rock 'N' Roll Billboards series were installed on the Sunset Strip, returning the billboard imagery to the boulevard where it was originally photographed.
Robert Landau lives and works in Los Angeles.
Robert Landau Photography: Hub Page
Collections at FATHOM: Rock 'N' Roll Billboards of the Sunset Strip | Art Deco LA | 1980s Melrose Ave.