By Jim Farber, Staff Writer

Photography had been around for more than two decades before anyone (as far as we know) thought to take a snapshot of Los Angeles.

Well, why would they? Before the arrival of the railroad in 1876 there was little reason to take the place seriously. The name may have been heavenly, but the City of Angels was little more than a dusty pueblo.

What Los Angeles did have going for it was an abundance of open space and blazing sunshine. What L.A. needed was some savvy promotion, like, say a decked-out-in-roses New Year's Day parade to get the attention of winter-bound America.

After the 1880s, the real-estate boom was on. Then the birth of aviation, the citrus industry and a dream factory called Hollywood helped transform nowhereland into Lotusland. Freeways, tract-house suburbs, inky smog, racial violence, Valley girls, the porn industry and surf's-up fever would come later.

"This Side of Paradise: Body and Language in Los Angeles Photographs" at the Huntington in San Marino celebrates 150 years of this wonderfully crazy city's development, from sleepy pueblo to booming metropolis.

"From the get-go, we wanted to do all of L.A. photography, which we knew was an ambitious undertaking." says the Huntington's curator of photography, Jennifer Watts. "We wanted to start at the beginning and go to the present, primarily to see what visual connections emerged."

"But," says co-curator Claudia Bohn-Spector emphatically, "this exhibition is really not about the evolution of Los Angeles in photographs. We were trying for something that's more conceptual, and it has to do with how a sense of a place gets generated.

"People create images of a place that bespeaks a certain desire," she explained, standing before one of David Hockney's iconic swimming pool collages. "And the place responds. It becomes a dialogue between the image and the reality. I think that's what this show is really about."

Spread over two galleries (the West Gallery of the Huntington Library and the spacious Boone Gallery) the exhibit contains 200 exceedingly diverse images, beginning with William M. Godfrey's 1862, "The Plaza, Los Angeles."

The installations, by the architectural firm of Daly Genik, have been cleverly conceived to function more like a series of freeway interchanges than a traditional photography show. The idea, said Watts, is to stimulate a type of visual free association.

The show, which combines iconic images with newly discovered treasures, is divided into seven categories descriptive of the L.A. lifestyle.

"Garden" celebrates the natural and urbanized landscape: from the pristine emptiness of C.C. Pierce's 1910 panorama of the Cahuenga Pass, to Julius Shulman's homage to 1950s modernism, "Case Study House #22, and Robert Adams' 1983 image of dusty Ontario in which two drooping palm trees seem to be commiserating over the plight of the neighborhood.

"Move" is devoted to Los Angeles, the land of open spaces and auto-mobility: from Carleton Watkins' dreamy evening vista of Santa Monica Canyon in 1877, to Ansel Adams' (yes, Ansel Adams) 1967 bird's-eye view, "Interchange," which transforms traffic congestion and concrete into curlicues of abstract art, while the 1940s documentary photographs by the Dick Wittington Studio evoke the days of drive-ins and the "Red Cars."

"Dwell" focuses on the notion that we are where we live: whether it's W.H Fletcher's 1880s images of Chinatown and Sonoratown, or Leland Rice's caustic 1980s portrait of ticky-tack suburbia. And then there's Timothy Street-Porter's wonderful "Flintstones Set at Vasquez Rocks" (from 1994), celebrating Fred and Wilma's brand of stone-age L.A. modernism.

"Work" focuses on the diverse ways we make a living: whether it's Edmund Teske's 1943 "Newspaper Vendor" on a downtown street, or Larry Sultan's 2002 San Fernando Valley shot of two languorous porn stars taking a backyard breather between takes.

"Dream." That's the commodity Los Angeles packages best: whether it's glamour for sale a la George Hurrell's air-brushed-perfect portraits of the stars, or Edward Weston's surreal back lot shot, "Rubber Dummies, MGM" from 1939.

"Play" features the king of L.A. surf photographers, Leroy Grannis, and his cowabunga shot of Henry Ford taking off on a wave at 22nd Street, Hermosa Beach, Nov. 3, 1963. This section also features Miles F. Weaver's 1926 cheesecake chorus line of beauty queen wannabes at Pacific Ocean Park Pier.

One of the most powerful categories in the exhibit is "Clash," which depicts the dark, Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy side of L.A.: whether it's C.C. Pierce's bombed-out Los Angeles Times building, Oct. 1, 1910; Robert Flora's disturbing, "Watts Riots- Army Jeep" from 1965; or Gusmano Cesaretti's mean street portraits of cholos from the 'hood.

Curated primarily from the Huntington's vast collection of 800,000 photographs, the exhibit also includes significant contributions from artists, collectors and museums, including Dennis Hopper's "Double Standard" from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The result is a collective group portrait that can be as poetically abstract as Robert Weingarten's crimson sunrise over the ocean, or as cold-blooded as Leigh Wiener's gritty black-and-white shot of Marilyn Monroe's bagged and tagged corpse in the L.A. morgue.

"I used to like this town," wrote Raymond Chandler in "The Little Sister." "Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but good-hearted and peaceful. Now ... we've got the riff-raff of a big hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup."

The curators of "This Side of Paradise" might argue we're that and a whole lot more.

Jim Farber (310) 540-5511, Ext. 416 jim.farber@dailybreeze.com

Photos: "Woman in Curlers," by Larry Sultan;  "Selma Avenue at Vine Street, Hollywood, Jan. 23, 1991," by John Humble