Kenneth McGowan photographed places where reality was supposed to look artificial and artificial things were designed to pass for reality. Movie sets, fake trees, masks, studio backlots, amusement attractions, stuffed Pink Panthers, and fragments of Hollywood spectacle became subjects for a photographer fascinated by the visual strangeness of Southern California.
Born in Ogden, Utah, in 1940, McGowan moved to Los Angeles and studied photography at UCLA, earning his bachelor’s degree in 1963 and his MFA in 1966. During the 1970s he became part of a generation of photographers who embraced color at a moment when serious art photography was still strongly associated with black and white. His photographs are often witty and visually seductive, but beneath their bright surfaces lies a persistent question: in a culture built around movies, advertising, tourism, and manufactured entertainment, where exactly does reality end?
That question became especially compelling in McGowan’s 1979 photographs of Universal Studios. Instead of photographing movie stars performing in front of cameras, he turned his attention toward the machinery of illusion itself. Fake landscapes, abandoned sets, props, masks, studio attractions, and strangely familiar fragments of movie history became his subjects.
The result is a wonderfully peculiar portrait of Hollywood from behind the curtain.
📷 From Utah to Los Angeles
McGowan was born in Ogden, Utah, in 1940 but established his artistic career in Southern California. Los Angeles was an especially fertile place to study photography during the 1960s and 1970s because the city itself offered an almost endless collection of visual contradictions.
Los Angeles could be suburban and industrial, glamorous and shabby, natural and completely manufactured. Freeways crossed landscapes once covered with orchards. Film studios contained replicas of distant cities. Amusement parks constructed imaginary worlds beside ordinary neighborhoods. Advertising turned streets into fields of commercial imagery, while Hollywood continually produced new versions of places that existed elsewhere—or nowhere at all.
McGowan studied at the University of California, Los Angeles, completing a BA in 1963 and an MFA in 1966. UCLA’s photography program produced a remarkable group of artists during the following decades, including photographers who would explore conceptual art, landscape, architecture, staged imagery, and the changing visual culture of the American West.
McGowan’s own work became closely connected with the peculiar visual environment surrounding him.
🌈 Taking Color Photography Seriously
McGowan worked during an important transition in the history of photography.
For much of the 20th century, black-and-white photography dominated museums, galleries, serious photographic books, and the art-school tradition. Color was everywhere in advertising, magazines, snapshots, tourism, and commercial photography, but that ubiquity sometimes worked against its acceptance as fine art.
By the 1970s, attitudes were changing.
Photographers including William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, Joel Meyerowitz, Mitch Epstein, Jan Groover, and others demonstrated that color could be used with the same formal and conceptual sophistication long associated with black and white.
McGowan belonged to this broader moment.
In 1981, his work appeared in The New Color: A Decade of Color Photography, an important exhibition organized by curator Sally Eauclaire that brought together dozens of photographers exploring the artistic possibilities of color.
For McGowan, color was especially appropriate because so much of the world he photographed depended upon artificial color.
Movie props were colored to convince.
Amusement attractions were colored to attract.
Commercial objects were colored to sell.
Color was not an addition to this world.
It was part of the subject.
🩷 Pink Panthers
One of McGowan’s most immediately memorable photographs is ** Pink Panthers ** from 1978.
The picture shows an outdoor display crowded with stuffed animals. Pink and red Panther figures hang among pandas, dogs, and other carnival prizes beneath a gray, threatening sky.
There is something wonderfully odd about the scene.
The toys are cheerful.
The weather is not.
Dozens of manufactured smiles face outward while dark clouds gather behind them.
McGowan does not need to construct an elaborate joke because the world has already created one.
The photograph was included in the portfolio New California Views, and examples entered several museum collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Hammer Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography.
The title sounds straightforward, but the image contains many of the themes that would dominate McGowan’s strongest work: popular culture, artificial objects, California, spectacle, and the unexpected visual poetry of things designed for entertainment.
🌴 A New California Landscape
The phrase New California Views is revealing.
California landscape photography had a long history of mountains, coastlines, deserts, valleys, and dramatic natural scenery. By the late 20th century, however, photographers increasingly turned toward landscapes transformed by highways, subdivisions, billboards, industry, tourism, and mass culture.
McGowan’s California is not untouched.
It is manufactured.
A pile of stuffed animals can become a landscape.
A movie backlot can become a city.
Fake vegetation can stand in for nature.
The distinction between the natural and the artificial begins to lose its usefulness.
This was particularly appropriate in Los Angeles, where illusion was not hidden from daily life. The entertainment industry physically occupied enormous parts of the city, and replicas of other places existed behind studio gates.
McGowan recognized that these spaces were worthy photographic subjects in themselves.
🎬 Going Behind the Scenes at Universal Studios
In 1979, McGowan created the body of work for which he is now most widely represented in museum collections: his Universal Studios series.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston holds an extensive group of these photographs, with titles including Buck Rogers Set, The Oval Room, Wall of Masks, Control Center, Movie Trees, Winter, Seascape, Orca, Backlot, Psycho House and Jaws, Throne Room, Universal Commissary, Academy Awards, Lily Tomlin’s Dresses, Phantom Car, and Star.
Read together, those titles sound almost like fragments from a surrealist poem.
McGowan approached Universal not simply as the location where movies were produced but as a strange physical archive of manufactured realities.
A forest might not be a forest.
A room might exist only because a script required it.
An animal might be mechanical.
A familiar building might have been photographed from angles carefully designed to prevent audiences from discovering what was behind it.
The camera normally participates in that illusion.
McGowan turned his camera around.
🌲 Movie Trees
Few subjects could express McGowan’s interests more perfectly than artificial trees.
Movie studios require landscapes to behave on command.
Real nature is inconvenient.
Trees grow in the wrong places.
Leaves change.
Weather alters their appearance.
Branches do not necessarily frame actors correctly.
Artificial vegetation solves those problems.
A fake tree can remain exactly where the production designer wants it.
McGowan’s Movie Trees transforms this practical filmmaking solution into something considerably stranger. Once removed from a finished movie, where such objects are supposed to disappear into the illusion, studio vegetation becomes visibly artificial.
The photograph asks us to look at something normally designed not to be noticed.
That reversal is central to the Universal Studios series.
McGowan photographs the evidence left behind by illusion.
🛸 Buck Rogers Set
A photograph titled Buck Rogers Set immediately evokes another central part of late-1970s popular culture: science fiction.
The revival of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century arrived during a period of enormous enthusiasm for cinematic and television visions of the future.
Yet a futuristic world seen from behind the scenes is inevitably less futuristic.
Walls have edges.
Spaceships require supports.
Control panels are pieces of scenery.
What appears enormous on television may occupy only a small studio.
McGowan was fascinated by this transformation.
A production set has two identities.
On screen, it may be the 25th century.
Standing beside it, it is California in 1979.
Photography allows both truths to occupy the same object.
🎭 The Wall of Masks
Masks are designed to transform one identity into another, making Wall of Masks another almost perfect McGowan subject.
Inside a finished film, a monster mask may become a creature.
On a storage wall, it becomes an object.
The transformation has been interrupted.
McGowan repeatedly photographed things in this intermediate state. They are no longer performing their assigned illusion but remain unmistakably connected to it.
The effect can be humorous, eerie, or both.
Hollywood depends upon viewers forgetting that someone constructed what they are watching.
McGowan asks viewers to remember.
🦈 Psycho House and Jaws
Perhaps no title from McGowan’s Universal series better captures the surreal compression of movie history than ** Psycho House and Jaws **.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws belong to entirely different stories, settings, and cinematic worlds.
At a studio, they can become neighbors.
The geography of filmmaking is not the geography audiences see on screen.
Norman Bates’s house can exist near an attraction connected with a giant shark because both are components within the physical infrastructure of entertainment.
McGowan’s photography reveals that hidden geography.
Movie history becomes a landscape assembled from unrelated illusions.
🎞️ Peck and Hitchcock
McGowan’s 1979 photograph ** Peck and Hitchcock ** entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
The title itself suggests another collision between cinema’s people and cinema’s manufactured image. Gregory Peck and Alfred Hitchcock were already cultural icons whose faces had circulated through films, publicity photographs, television, posters, magazines, and advertising.
McGowan’s interest lies less in celebrity portraiture than in what happens when celebrity becomes an image among other images.
Hollywood turns people into pictures.
Photography can then photograph those pictures.
Reality moves one additional step away.
That kind of visual recursion fascinated many artists during the 1970s, when photography was increasingly being used to examine the enormous image culture produced by movies, television, and advertising.
McGowan found that image culture already physically arranged for him inside Universal Studios.
💚 Hulk
Another of McGowan’s Universal photographs held by the Museum of Modern Art is simply titled ** Hulk **.
By 1979, Marvel’s Incredible Hulk had become a familiar television presence through the series starring Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno. The character depended upon transformation: an ordinary human being suddenly becomes something enormous, green, and superhuman.
Hollywood then had to manufacture that transformation.
McGowan’s photograph brings the viewer back toward the material reality behind fantasy.
The fictional character exists as image, costume, representation, prop, or publicity object.
The entertainment industry creates icons.
McGowan photographs the things used to construct them.
🏛️ The Oval Room
Even political space could become entertainment scenery.
A photograph titled The Oval Room belongs to the same Universal series. The title immediately recalls the Oval Office, one of the most recognizable political interiors in American visual culture.
Yet film and television routinely recreate locations that audiences assume they recognize.
The White House can exist in Hollywood.
A courtroom can exist in Hollywood.
New York streets can exist in Hollywood.
Ancient Rome can exist in Hollywood.
Outer space can exist in Hollywood.
McGowan’s camera treats these replicas as peculiar objects worthy of attention precisely because they occupy the border between reality and representation.
They are fake places designed to produce real memories in audiences.
🐋 Orcas, Sharks & Mechanical Nature
Animals presented McGowan with another version of the same problem.
Cinema frequently requires nature to perform in ways real nature cannot. A shark must appear on cue. A whale must behave predictably. Weather has to arrive on schedule.
The studio therefore produces substitutes.
McGowan’s Orca belongs to this world of constructed animals and controlled natural spectacle.
Once again, he is interested in the moment when the illusion is incomplete.
A cinematic animal outside its finished movie becomes strangely vulnerable.
The frightening or majestic creature becomes an object waiting for someone to turn the illusion back on.
🎢 Hollywood & the Amusement Park
Universal Studios was not only a production facility.
It was also becoming an increasingly elaborate tourist destination where visitors could encounter movie history as entertainment.
That added another layer to McGowan’s photographs.
A film set originally created to fool a camera might later be preserved because tourists wanted to see it.
An illusion became an attraction.
The attraction then became something people photographed.
McGowan photographed that entire system.
The original object may have begun as scenery, but its meaning changes as it moves from production to tourism to art photography.
A fake house becomes a real landmark.
This is pure Southern California.
🌆 The Long Beach Documentary Survey
McGowan’s interests were not limited to Hollywood studios.
In 1979, he also participated in the Long Beach Documentary Survey Project, an effort to photograph the changing urban environment of Long Beach, California. Works from the project are now preserved by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
His photographs include subjects such as The Pike, the famous seaside amusement area, along with gas stations, commercial architecture, automobiles, and people moving through ordinary urban spaces.
The project connected McGowan with a broader movement in American photography that was reconsidering what counted as landscape.
Parking lots mattered.
Gas stations mattered.
Commercial signs mattered.
Amusement parks mattered.
The built environment was not something to crop away in search of pristine nature.
It was the environment Americans actually inhabited.
🎡 The Pike
Long Beach’s Pike amusement district was an especially appropriate McGowan subject.
Amusement parks create condensed worlds of visual excitement.
Signs compete for attention.
Architecture exaggerates itself.
Animals may be represented as cartoons.
Colors become brighter than ordinary life.
Entertainment is announced everywhere.
McGowan’s photograph associated with the Pike continues his interest in places where reality and spectacle become difficult to separate.
An amusement park does not hide the fact that it is artificial.
Artificiality is the attraction.
That distinguishes it from Hollywood filmmaking, where sets often try to disappear into the story.
Yet visually the two environments are closely related.
Both create worlds designed for looking.
⛽ The Ordinary California Street
Other Long Beach photographs demonstrate that McGowan did not require movie sets or amusement attractions to find visual strangeness.
A gas station could be enough.
Commercial architecture could generate unexpected compositions of signs, cars, figures, pumps, painted surfaces, and pavement.
California’s automobile culture had transformed the visual environment by the time McGowan was working. Streets were increasingly designed to be understood from moving cars rather than by pedestrians.
Businesses became signs.
Architecture became advertising.
Parking lots became foregrounds.
McGowan treated these spaces without romantic nostalgia.
They were simply part of the new landscape.
🖼️ MoMA & the New Photography of the 1970s
McGowan’s work began appearing in major exhibitions during the late 1970s.
The Museum of Modern Art records his participation in exhibitions including New Art for the New Year in 1978 and Movin’ in 1979–80. His work also appeared at MoMA PS1 in the 1981 photography exhibition Couches, Diamonds and Pie.
These exhibitions place McGowan within a period when photographic practice was expanding dramatically.
Artists were making color photographs, staged photographs, conceptual photographs, photographs of television screens, altered images, photographic sequences, and pictures of ordinary commercial landscapes.
The old idea that serious photography had to depict decisive moments in black and white was rapidly losing its dominance.
McGowan’s work fit naturally into this more experimental environment.
🌈 The New Color
His inclusion in The New Color: A Decade of Color Photography in 1981 provides an especially useful historical context.
The exhibition included photographers such as William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, Joel Meyerowitz, Mitch Epstein, Jan Groover, John Divola, William Christenberry, Helen Levitt, Joel Sternfeld, and David Hockney.
These photographers did not constitute a single movement.
Their subjects and methods differed enormously.
What connected them was a willingness to treat color photography as a serious artistic language.
McGowan’s contribution to that history came partly through recognizing that Southern California’s artificial environments demanded color.
A Pink Panther should be pink.
A movie set’s painted surfaces matter.
The strange visual seduction of Hollywood would lose something essential if reduced entirely to gray.
📸 Photography About Photography
There is another layer running beneath McGowan’s film-studio pictures.
He was using photography to examine things made specifically for photography.
Movie sets exist because cameras will photograph them.
Props are built to convince cameras.
Lighting is arranged for cameras.
Artificial scenery works because the finished image excludes whatever would reveal the trick.
McGowan’s camera enters that system but refuses to cooperate.
Instead of completing the illusion, it exposes the construction.
This makes the Universal Studios series partly about photography itself.
A camera can lie.
A camera can reveal the lie.
Sometimes it can do both simultaneously.
🏗️ The Architecture of Illusion
McGowan’s photographs also encourage us to take temporary architecture seriously.
Film sets are usually constructed with planned obsolescence.
They exist only as long as someone needs them.
A wall may have nothing behind it.
A building may consist entirely of a facade.
An elaborate room may disappear after a production ends.
Traditional architectural photography often celebrates permanence.
McGowan photographed architecture built to vanish.
That makes the Universal series an unusual historical document in addition to being a work of art.
The images preserve pieces of an entertainment landscape that was constantly being rebuilt.
🪩 Humor Without Punchlines
McGowan’s photography can be very funny, but the humor rarely operates like a conventional joke.
There is no punchline.
Instead, the comedy emerges through observation.
Dozens of Pink Panthers hang beneath storm clouds.
Fake trees wait to become a forest.
A shark and Norman Bates’s house occupy the same landscape.
Masks hang on a wall waiting to become characters.
An imaginary control center sits quietly when nobody is filming.
McGowan simply recognizes how peculiar these things become once removed from their intended contexts.
The world has done most of the work for him.
His skill lies in noticing.
📚 The UCLA Photography Legacy
McGowan’s connection with UCLA remained part of his photographic legacy.
In 1985, UCLA published the 20/20 portfolio, bringing together work by photographers who had completed the university’s graduate photography program over the previous two decades.
McGowan was included alongside artists such as Jo Ann Callis, John Divola, Robbert Flick, Patrick Nagatani, Sheila Pinkel, Victor Landweber, and others.
The portfolio reveals how significant Southern California had become to the development of contemporary photography.
These artists approached photography in very different ways, but collectively they helped establish Los Angeles as much more than a city where photographs were commercially produced.
It was also a place where photographers were questioning what the medium itself could mean.
🕯️ A Career Cut Short
Kenneth McGowan died in New York City in 1986.
He was only in his mid-forties.
That early death inevitably leaves his surviving career feeling incomplete.
The museum record concentrates heavily on work from the late 1970s, particularly Pink Panthers, the Universal Studios series, and photographs associated with Southern California.
Yet those images were strong enough to enter major institutional collections.
Today, McGowan’s work is held by museums including the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography.
That institutional presence has preserved an artist whose biography is otherwise surprisingly difficult to reconstruct in detail.
🎬 Hollywood After the Magic Trick
The Universal Studios photographs remain especially compelling because our relationship with movie illusion has changed so dramatically.
In 1979, a science-fiction city or mechanical creature required physical construction.
Sets occupied warehouses and backlots.
Props had weight.
Fake trees took up real space.
Today, enormous portions of fantastic environments can be created digitally.
That makes McGowan’s pictures unexpectedly historical.
They record an era when illusion often had to exist physically before it could appear photographically.
Somebody had to build the wall.
Somebody had to paint the tree.
Somebody had to store the mask.
Somebody had to construct the monster.
McGowan photographed that hidden labor indirectly by paying attention to the objects it left behind.
✨ Kenneth McGowan’s Artificial America
Kenneth McGowan understood something essential about Southern California.
Artificiality does not necessarily make something less real.
A movie set is fake as a building but real as a movie set.
A stuffed Pink Panther is not an animal but is unquestionably a real object hanging beneath a real California sky.
A mechanical shark is not a shark, but it can become part of millions of people’s memories.
Hollywood constantly transforms constructed objects into believable images.
McGowan reversed the process.
He took familiar illusions and returned them to the world of ordinary things.
Suddenly the future was plywood.
The monster was rubber.
The forest was artificial.
The movie landmark was simply sitting on a backlot.
And yet something magical remained.
That tension between illusion and reality gives Kenneth McGowan’s photographs their lasting charm. He photographed Hollywood after the magic trick had been explained—and discovered that the machinery behind the illusion could be every bit as strange and fascinating as the illusion itself.
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📚 Sources & Further Reading
- Museum of Modern Art — Kenneth McGowan
- Museum of Modern Art — Peck and Hitchcock
- Smithsonian American Art Museum — Kenneth McGowan
- Smithsonian American Art Museum — Pink Panthers
- Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — Kenneth McGowan
- Museum of Contemporary Photography — Pink Panthers
- Los Angeles County Museum of Art — Pink Panthers
- Hammer Museum — Pink Panthers
- International Center of Photography — The New Color: A Decade of Color Photography
