Robert Landau (American, b. 1953) has spent more than five decades building one of the most distinctive photographic records of Los Angeles ever assembled. Born in the city, raised in the Hollywood Hills — his father ran the Felix Landau Gallery, one of L.A.'s pioneering avant-garde spaces — he picked up a camera as a teenager and never stopped pointing it at the urban landscape around him. Landau's eye goes to the ephemeral: the hand-painted billboard that will be whitewashed in thirty days, the Melrose storefront that will be something else by next year, the Art Deco theater facade that could fall to a developer or a fire. His six published books and touring museum exhibitions — shown at the Skirball Cultural Center, the Grammy Museum, the Arlington Museum of Art, and the Vero Beach Museum of Art, among others — have established him as the definitive visual chronicler of the cultural artifacts Los Angeles keeps building and losing. His work is in the permanent collection of the Oakland Museum and on permanent display at LAX's Tom Bradley International Terminal. Landau studied photography at the California Institute of the Arts (BFA, 1976) and lives and works in Los Angeles.
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Robert Landau Collections
Rock 'N' Roll Billboards of the Sunset Strip
In 1967, Elektra Records rented a billboard on the Sunset Strip to promote a local band called the Doors. It worked. Within a few years, the Strip was lined with colossal hand-painted portraits of rock's biggest names — the Beatles, Bowie, the Stones, Led Zeppelin, Joni Mitchell — each one up for a month or two before being whitewashed and painted over. Landau, still a teenager, was living with his father in an apartment a block above the boulevard. He loaded his camera with Kodachrome and started shooting. Nobody else did — not systematically, not over the full fifteen-year run of the phenomenon. His photographs are the only extensive visual record of these billboards, and they capture something beyond the artwork itself: the surreal collision of giant rock icons looming over morning work crews, palm trees, and the passing traffic of everyday L.A. The images became his best-selling book, Rock 'N' Roll Billboards of the Sunset Strip (Angel City Press, 2012, now in its third printing), and a touring museum exhibition that remains active through 2027. FATHOM's collection presents 25 selected works from the book as signed limited edition prints.
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Art Deco LA
Landau has always been drawn to the one-of-a-kind structures that define the L.A. cityscape, and the city's Art Deco architecture held him long before he had an academic framework for it. The turquoise terra cotta of the Eastern Columbia Building, the sunburst ceiling of the Wiltern Theatre, the Streamline Moderne pylons of the Pan-Pacific Auditorium — he photographed them over more than four decades, often returning to the same buildings as the light or the surrounding streetscape changed around them. His book Art Deco Los Angeles (Angel City Press, 2025), with a foreword by architectural historian Alan Hess, arrived to coincide with the centennial of the 1925 Paris Exposition that gave the movement its name. The book is part celebration and part urgent record. In a city defined by constant redevelopment, several of the buildings Landau photographed no longer exist — the Pan-Pacific burned in 1989. FATHOM's collection draws twelve prints from that body of work, spanning the full range of Deco expression in Southern California: theaters, civic monuments, neon signage, and the sculptural facades that make L.A.'s architectural heritage unlike any other American city.
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1980's Melrose Ave.
In the 1980s, New York had the East Village and Los Angeles had Melrose Avenue. Landau walked the stretch between La Brea and Fairfax when it was at full tilt — vintage clothing shops with three-dimensional signage spilling onto the sidewalk, record stores painted floor to ceiling in polka dots, eyewear boutiques and soap shops competing to out-weird each other for the attention of passing foot traffic. His Melrose photographs have a different energy than the billboard or Deco work. They're warmer, funnier, more populated. The storefronts are performing, and Landau catches them mid-act — a reclining mannequin in a shop window, a neon sign glowing above an otherwise quiet block, a couple posed outside Aaardvarks in full vintage regalia. What the images document is a specific moment in L.A. retail culture that no longer exists. Melrose gentrified, the original shops closed or moved, and the street became something else entirely. These eleven prints are the record of what it looked and felt like before that happened.