Robbert Flick: Los Angeles, Sequential Views & the Photography of Movement

SV003/80, Ocean Park from Sequential Views (1980) | gelatin silver print | *Robbert Flick* | Smithsonian American Art Museum

Robbert Flick does something unusual with landscape photography: he refuses to pretend that we experience a place in a single frozen moment. We walk through it. We turn our heads. We drive past it. Buildings disappear behind other buildings, roads carry us toward something and then away again, and landscapes change according to where we stand and how quickly we move. Flick’s photographs attempt to preserve some of that complicated experience.

Born in Amersfoort, Netherlands, in 1939, Flick became one of the most distinctive photographers associated with Southern California during the final decades of the 20th century. Rather than searching primarily for dramatic landmarks or pristine landscapes, he photographed streets, beaches, highways, parks, industrial corridors, suburban neighborhoods, deserts, and ordinary stretches of Los Angeles. He then arranged many of those photographs into sequences and grids that transform individual exposures into much larger visual systems.

A Flick photograph may contain dozens or even hundreds of individual views. Seen from a distance, the entire work can resemble a pattern, map, or abstract composition. Move closer and recognizable fragments emerge: palm trees, apartment buildings, cars, road signs, beaches, houses, intersections, mountains, power lines, empty lots, and the Pacific Ocean.

The viewer is not given one decisive view of a place.

Instead, Flick gives us the act of moving through it.

📷 From the Netherlands to North America

Flick was born in Amersfoort in the Netherlands and spent portions of his early life outside the United States before eventually studying in Canada. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and later moved to Southern California to continue his education at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he completed graduate degrees in art.

The move to Los Angeles proved decisive.

Southern California had already become one of the most photographed regions in the world. Hollywood had created countless fantasies of Los Angeles, while advertising, television, tourism, real-estate promotion, and popular photography had contributed equally powerful images of beaches, palm trees, automobiles, mountains, freeways, and sunshine.

Flick encountered the same landscape but approached it differently. Instead of searching for a perfect image of Los Angeles, he became interested in the difficulty of seeing the city at all.

Los Angeles sprawls.

It changes constantly.

Much of it is experienced through motion.

That problem became the foundation of his art.

🌴 Discovering Los Angeles

When Flick arrived in Southern California during the late 1960s, he entered an artistic environment increasingly interested in conceptual art, photography, landscape, architecture, and the cultural meaning of the city itself.

Los Angeles did not resemble older American cities built around dense pedestrian centers. Its geography stretched across an enormous basin divided by highways, boulevards, residential neighborhoods, commercial strips, industrial corridors, hills, beaches, and mountains.

Driving became fundamental to understanding the place.

So did fragmentation.

You might see one neighborhood through a windshield, another from a freeway overpass, and another while waiting at an intersection. The city rarely presents itself as a complete picture.

Flick began treating that fragmented experience not as a problem photography needed to correct but as the subject photography could explore.

🎞️ The Early L.A. Diary

One of Flick’s important early bodies of work was ** L.A. Diary **, created during the late 1960s.

The series already challenged the idea that photography should isolate one visually perfect moment. Flick experimented with multiple exposures and sequences, allowing separate encounters with Los Angeles to accumulate within the photographic image.

Traffic lights, buildings, signs, shadows, streets, and other fragments collide and overlap. Instead of presenting the city as a stable location viewed from a fixed position, the pictures suggest the continuous visual information encountered while moving through it.

Flick later described this period as one in which the act of photographing became increasingly important to him. He was interested not only in what stood in front of the camera but in the process of moving, looking, and making exposures.

Photography became a record of experience rather than simply a record of objects.

🚗 Los Angeles Is a City Seen in Motion

This concern suited Los Angeles particularly well because so much of the city is seen while traveling.

A driver does not experience a boulevard as a single image. Storefronts appear one after another. Signs overlap. Cars interrupt the view. Buildings become visible and disappear. Trees flash past the windshield. The same street feels entirely different according to speed, direction, traffic, weather, and time of day.

Traditional photography stops all of that.

One exposure freezes one fraction of a second.

Flick began asking what would happen if a photograph acknowledged that limitation rather than hiding it.

His eventual solution was to combine many individual photographs into a larger structure.

The photograph became plural.

🌾 Midwest Diary

Flick’s interest in movement and landscape extended beyond Southern California.

During the 1970s, he produced ** Midwest Diary **, photographing rural landscapes, agricultural areas, roads, and spaces encountered while traveling through the American Midwest.

The work continued his exploration of how places are experienced over time rather than through a single iconic viewpoint. A field glimpsed from the road is not isolated from the mile of road that came before it or the landscape that follows.

Flick photographed those transitions.

The resulting pictures can feel quiet compared with his later Los Angeles grids, but the underlying idea is already there. A place cannot always be understood through one photograph because the experience of reaching it, pausing within it, and leaving it behind is part of what the place means.

Landscape becomes duration.

🛣️ The Road as a Photographic Structure

American landscape photography has always had a close relationship with roads.

Roads provide access to landscapes while simultaneously changing them. They organize movement, connect communities, divide land, and determine what travelers are able to see.

For Flick, the road also became a ready-made photographic system.

Follow a road and locations appear in sequence.

Stand at predetermined points and the landscape can be sampled methodically.

Turn toward the same direction at regular intervals and an apparently casual trip becomes structured observation.

That combination of movement and system would become crucial to Flick’s most recognizable body of work.

🔲 Sequential Views

Around the end of the 1970s, Flick began developing what became known as ** Sequential Views **.

Instead of presenting a single conventional landscape photograph, he arranged numerous small black-and-white exposures into precisely organized grids. Each image represents part of a larger photographic journey, and together they describe a place through repeated acts of looking.

The works can contain beaches, roads, neighborhoods, deserts, rock formations, or urban environments. Individual frames remain separate, divided by white space, yet the viewer instinctively tries to connect them.

A photograph in one row appears related to the image beside it.

Another seems to continue something happening several frames later.

The grid becomes a visual puzzle.

Flick has taken continuous space apart and reconstructed it according to another order.

🌊 Ocean Park

Flick’s ** SV003/80, Ocean Park from Sequential Views ** from 1980 is an especially revealing example.

The work contains a large grid of small black-and-white photographs moving from the beach through the surrounding urban environment. Ocean, sand, people, palm trees, roads, houses, apartments, and other fragments appear in successive frames.

No individual photograph dominates the composition.

The beach is not presented as a spectacular postcard view.

It is one part of a larger environment.

The viewer gradually moves from one kind of space into another, much as someone physically walking away from the Pacific would leave the open horizon and enter the increasingly dense structures of the city.

The landscape becomes a sequence of transitions.

🏖️ Manhattan Beach

Flick used a similar method in works such as ** SV008/80, Manhattan Beach, Looking North ** and ** SV014/80, Manhattan Beach, Looking West **.

Again, the familiar Southern California beach becomes something more complicated than a picturesque coastline.

The grids include residential streets, utility poles, parked cars, houses, pavement, vegetation, and ocean views. Coastal beauty and ordinary suburban infrastructure exist together because that is how the actual landscape exists.

Flick refuses to isolate the attractive portions from the mundane ones.

A palm tree and a telephone pole belong to the same geography.

A beach exists beside houses.

An ocean view may be reached through a parking area.

Instead of deciding which part represents Southern California, Flick allows all of these fragments to participate.

🧭 Photography Becomes a Map

The grids of Sequential Views resemble maps without functioning exactly like them.

A conventional map converts physical space into lines, symbols, measurements, and coordinates. Flick converts physical space into photographs.

Both systems depend upon selection.

Neither can show everything.

The difference is that a map usually attempts to make geography easier to navigate, while Flick’s photographic maps can initially make a place more difficult to understand.

The viewer has to search for relationships.

Where are we now?

Did the camera turn?

Are these images beside one another because the locations were physically adjacent, because they were photographed sequentially, or because Flick wanted us to compare them?

The uncertainty becomes part of the experience.

🕰️ Time Enters the Landscape

The grid also allows time to become visible.

A traditional landscape photograph contains time, but that duration is usually hidden behind the illusion of one instant. Flick’s grids openly acknowledge that each frame was made at a different moment.

The photographer moved.

Light changed.

Cars moved.

People entered and left.

Clouds shifted.

Even if only seconds separate two exposures, they cannot occupy exactly the same time.

A Sequential View therefore contains many moments simultaneously.

The final work is both a landscape and a timeline.

🏜️ Highway 14 & the California Desert

Flick applied this method beyond Los Angeles’s dense urban neighborhoods.

In ** East of Lancaster, Along Highway 14, California ** from 1981, he turned his attention toward the desert environment northeast of Los Angeles.

The resulting series became part of the American Roads portfolio.

Here the expansiveness of the landscape creates a different kind of sequence. Roads stretch toward distant horizons, while open land, mountains, utility structures, and sparse development appear repeatedly.

The grid prevents the desert from becoming one majestic panoramic view.

Instead, Flick breaks the journey into parts.

This creates an experience closer to actual travel.

A desert crossing is not one view.

It is a succession of views that slowly become a journey.

🌊 Catalina & the Horizon

The 1982 work ** SV049/82 Bay View Catalina ** approaches landscape from yet another direction.

Made on Santa Catalina Island, it consists of a grid of photographs showing the Pacific Ocean and rocky shoreline.

The ocean might seem like the ideal subject for a single panoramic photograph because its horizon appears continuous.

Flick fragments it anyway.

Water reappears from frame to frame.

Rock formations interrupt the view.

The horizon shifts slightly.

Repeated images of seemingly similar scenery reveal that no two acts of looking are actually identical.

The project turns one of photography’s oldest landscape subjects—the sea—into a study of perception.

🪨 At Pinnacles

Flick’s investigations of natural space also included places such as Pinnacles in California.

Rather than treating spectacular geological formations as isolated monuments, he could divide them into separate exposures and viewpoints. The strategy challenges a long tradition of American landscape photography built around the single magnificent image.

The grand Western landscape has often been presented as timeless and untouched.

Flick’s approach introduces the person moving through it.

The land remains impressive, but the photograph no longer pretends the viewer possesses one ideal position from which everything can be understood.

There are many positions.

There are many moments.

The landscape changes as we do.

🌆 Returning to the City

Although natural and rural landscapes remained important, Los Angeles became the environment with which Flick was most closely associated.

The city provided a nearly inexhaustible subject because it was continually changing.

Development altered neighborhoods.

Commercial signs appeared and disappeared.

Traffic patterns changed.

Buildings were demolished.

New construction filled vacant lots.

Different communities occupied adjoining stretches of the same boulevard.

A photographic project based on movement could reveal relationships that a conventional architectural photograph might miss.

Flick became less interested in isolated buildings than in the networks connecting them.

The street itself became the organizing principle.

🚦 Los Angeles as an Accumulation

Los Angeles resists the kind of single skyline photograph used to summarize cities such as New York or Chicago.

Its identity is dispersed.

Downtown is important, but it is not the whole city.

Hollywood is important, but it is not the whole city.

The beaches are important, but they are not the whole city.

Los Angeles accumulates through neighborhoods, roads, shopping districts, industrial zones, freeways, houses, signs, and countless ordinary places between better-known destinations.

Flick’s photographic structure is perfectly suited to this kind of city.

Instead of searching for one image that supposedly represents Los Angeles, he assembles many partial images.

The incompleteness becomes more truthful than a single grand view.

📹 From Walking to Driving

During the 1990s, new technology allowed Flick to reconsider his earlier methods.

His Sequential Views had often depended upon walking predetermined routes and making exposures at regular spatial or temporal intervals.

For the later ** L.A. Documents **, he began working with Hi-8 video while traveling through the city by car.

This shift mattered because the automobile is fundamental to the physical and perceptual structure of Los Angeles.

Flick could now record continuous movement through streets and later extract individual frames from the video.

The photographer no longer had to stop repeatedly.

The camera could move with the city.

🛣️ Trajectories Through Los Angeles

Flick began identifying major streets as trajectories through the urban environment.

A boulevard does more than connect two points.

It may cross neighborhoods with dramatically different histories, populations, economies, architecture, and cultural identities.

Driving along Pico Boulevard, Broadway, Melrose Avenue, Central Avenue, or Alameda Street creates a kind of cross-section through Los Angeles.

A few miles can carry the viewer through enormous social and visual changes.

Flick’s camera records those transitions systematically.

The street becomes both route and argument.

Los Angeles is revealed not as a collection of isolated communities but as a network of places physically connected even when they appear culturally distant.

🚙 Pico Boulevard

One of Flick’s most ambitious urban investigations followed Pico Boulevard, stretching from Santa Monica through Los Angeles.

The resulting work, created during the 1990s, consists of dense sequences of color images arranged in long horizontal bands.

From a distance, the piece almost resembles woven material.

Bands of sky, cars, architecture, trees, commercial signs, and streets accumulate until the individual photographs begin merging into a larger visual field.

Move closer and the city reappears in fragments.

A storefront becomes visible.

Then a vehicle.

Then a palm tree.

Then another intersection.

The work recreates something remarkably close to the experience of traveling along a Los Angeles boulevard: too much information arrives too quickly to absorb completely.

🧵 The City as Fabric

Flick’s later color works often resemble textiles because repeated photographic strips create intricate visual patterns.

This resemblance is more than decorative.

A city is also woven from repeated structures.

Roads cross other roads.

Utility lines stretch between poles.

Buildings repeat similar shapes.

Cars move along lanes.

Neighborhoods connect and overlap.

The visual fabric Flick creates from individual images becomes an analogue for the physical fabric of the city.

No single thread explains the whole.

The pattern emerges through accumulation.

🚢 Alameda Street

Flick also photographed Alameda Street, the long transportation and industrial corridor linking central Los Angeles with the harbor region.

In the late 1990s, this work appeared in the Getty Research Institute exhibition Port and Corridor: Working Sites in Los Angeles alongside photographs by Allan Sekula.

The pairing was particularly appropriate because both photographers were interested in the infrastructure that allows cities to function.

Ports, roads, warehouses, transportation routes, industrial areas, and distribution networks are rarely presented as iconic Southern California scenery.

Yet they are essential to the region.

Flick’s photography makes these apparently ordinary systems visible.

📱 Before the Infinite Scroll

Flick’s later photographic sequences seem remarkably contemporary when viewed in the age of smartphones.

People now encounter enormous numbers of images through screens, scrolling continuously through photographs that may have no obvious relationship beyond the order in which they appear.

Flick was exploring image accumulation decades earlier.

His grids force viewers to navigate large quantities of visual information.

The question changes from “What does this photograph show?” to “How do I move through all of these photographs?”

That problem became increasingly important to him as digital imaging expanded.

The challenge was no longer merely producing images.

It was creating meaning from an overwhelming number of them.

💻 Digital Technology Changes the Process

Digital tools gave Flick greater control over how individual frames could be selected, organized, manipulated, and printed.

Rather than abandoning his earlier photographic ideas, digital technology allowed him to extend them.

His concern remained movement through space and time.

The tools changed.

The black-and-white contact-style grids of Sequential Views eventually gave way to large color works assembled from video frames and digital imagery, but the central question survived.

How can still photography represent continuous experience?

Flick never completely solves the problem because it may be impossible to solve.

Instead, his work makes the problem visible.

🌊 Returning to the Ocean

Even as technology became increasingly important to his process, Flick continued returning to classical landscape subjects.

Ocean sequences created on the California coast combine large numbers of individual exposures into broad fields of changing water, horizon, sky, and light.

From a distance, these works can resemble conventional seascapes.

Closer inspection destroys that illusion.

The waves belong to different moments.

The light changes across the sequence.

One horizon is actually many horizons assembled together.

The sea appears continuous only because the viewer mentally connects the pieces.

Once again, Flick demonstrates that seeing is partly an act of construction.

📸 Walker Evans & the Power of Looking Clearly

Among the photographers Flick has discussed as an important influence is Walker Evans.

Evans’s apparently straightforward photographs of architecture, signs, streets, and ordinary American environments demonstrated that a photographer did not need spectacular events to create visually and culturally significant images.

Flick admired the precision of Evans’s observation and the way individual photographs could appear almost neutral while generating broader connections when viewed together.

That principle is particularly relevant to Flick’s own work.

His individual frames frequently seem ordinary.

A house.

A street.

A road.

A tree.

A parked automobile.

Their power emerges through relationships.

One image may appear inconsequential.

Fifty images can become a geography.

🧠 Conceptual Photography Without Losing the World

Flick belongs to a generation that helped bring conceptual thinking into photography without necessarily abandoning recognizable subjects.

His photographs are clearly about real places.

They document Los Angeles, California deserts, coastlines, roads, and other environments.

Yet documentation is only the beginning.

The method used to photograph the place becomes equally important.

Routes are predetermined.

Intervals matter.

Images are organized systematically.

Movement determines sequence.

Technology influences perception.

The concept structures the act of looking.

Yet the city never disappears behind the concept.

There are still cars, buildings, oceans, roads, and people to look at.

👨‍🏫 Photography & Teaching

Flick also had a long career as an educator and became a professor of studio art at the University of Southern California.

Teaching photography during the decades in which Flick worked meant watching the medium undergo enormous technological change. Film, darkrooms, gelatin silver printing, color processes, video, computers, scanners, digital cameras, and inkjet printing all altered how photographs could be produced and understood.

Flick’s own practice adapted to those changes rather than treating one photographic technology as sacred.

That adaptability made sense for an artist whose central interest was never simply the camera.

His real subject was perception.

Whatever technology best allowed him to investigate that problem could become useful.

🏅 Fellowships & Recognition

Flick’s work received significant institutional recognition as his career developed.

He received National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in 1982 and 1984 and later a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was also a scholar at the Getty Center during the 1990s and received additional support including a City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship.

His work entered major museum collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, J. Paul Getty Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and other institutions in the United States and abroad.

Those collections preserve not merely individual photographs but an evolving investigation of how photography might describe space.

🖼️ Trajectories

In 2004, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art presented ** Trajectories: The Photographic Work of Robbert Flick **, the first major retrospective devoted to his career.

The exhibition traced more than three decades of work, beginning with photographs from the late 1960s and moving through Midwest Diary, Sequential Views, and his increasingly complex Los Angeles projects.

The title was exceptionally appropriate.

A trajectory is a path created through movement.

Flick’s career is full of them.

The photographer moves through a landscape.

The camera follows a route.

Images move from film to grid.

A car moves down Pico Boulevard.

The viewer’s eye moves across the finished work.

The retrospective revealed that these were not separate experiments so much as different stages of one long investigation.

🏛️ Landscapes in Passing

The Smithsonian American Art Museum returned attention to Flick’s landscape photography in the 2013 exhibition ** Landscapes in Passing **, presenting his work alongside photographers Steve Fitch and Elaine Mayes.

The exhibition examined artists who rejected traditional ideas about the monumental American landscape in favor of places experienced through mobility and contemporary transportation.

Flick was a natural fit.

His landscapes are rarely untouched wilderness awaiting contemplation.

Roads enter them.

Cities approach them.

Human movement organizes them.

Even when the subject is an ocean or rocky landscape, the camera remains conscious of how the viewer arrived there and how the act of seeing unfolds over time.

The American landscape, in Flick’s photographs, is something we pass through.

👁️ The Viewer Has to Work

Flick’s photographs demand a different kind of attention from the viewer.

A single landscape can often be absorbed quickly. We identify the mountain, ocean, house, or street and understand the basic structure of the image.

A Flick grid resists that speed.

There is always another photograph beside the one you are examining.

Your eye moves horizontally.

Then vertically.

Then diagonally.

You may follow a road through several frames before losing it.

A building may appear in one image and vanish in the next.

The work becomes almost interactive because every viewer can choose a different route through it.

Flick photographs trajectories.

Then he makes us create our own.

🗺️ Geography Becomes Personal

Maps appear objective because they use standardized symbols and measured distances, yet every journey through a map is personal.

We choose one road rather than another.

We notice some landmarks and ignore others.

Flick’s photographic grids operate in a similar way.

The structure may be systematic, but the experience of looking is individual.

One viewer notices automobiles.

Another notices architecture.

Someone else follows changes in vegetation.

Another person becomes fascinated by the empty spaces between photographs.

The work therefore contains both order and freedom.

Flick supplies the geography.

The viewer determines the route.

🚦 Photographing the Ordinary City

One of Flick’s greatest strengths is his willingness to treat ordinary urban space as worthy of prolonged attention.

Los Angeles contains famous landmarks, but most residents do not spend every day looking at the Hollywood sign or walking along the red carpet.

They see traffic lights.

Gas stations.

Apartment buildings.

Commercial strips.

Freeway ramps.

Utility poles.

Parking lots.

Palm trees.

Vacant spaces.

These ordinary visual experiences are central to how a city actually becomes familiar.

Flick gives them structure and importance.

He makes everyday Los Angeles worth looking at precisely because people normally pass through it without looking carefully.

⏱️ One Photograph Is Never Enough

Traditional photography often values the decisive moment: the fraction of a second in which subject, gesture, composition, and meaning suddenly align.

Flick’s work offers almost the opposite proposition.

Sometimes one moment is insufficient.

A place exists before the shutter opens and continues after it closes.

The photographer cannot possess the whole experience through one exposure.

The grid acknowledges that limitation.

Another photograph follows.

Then another.

No matter how many images accumulate, something remains outside the frame.

This gives Flick’s work an unusual humility.

Photography can describe a place.

It cannot completely contain it.

✨ Robbert Flick & the Photography of Moving Through the World

Robbert Flick transformed the ordinary act of moving through a landscape into a sustained photographic investigation. Roads, sidewalks, beaches, deserts, city streets, industrial corridors, and shorelines become structures through which seeing unfolds over time.

His photographs remind us that places are not encountered as finished pictures. We discover them piece by piece. We look ahead, glance sideways, turn around, stop, continue, and remember fragments after the rest has disappeared.

Flick takes those fragments and gives them form.

His grids impose order without pretending the world itself is orderly. His sequences preserve movement without turning into movies. His Los Angeles photographs document real streets while also revealing how difficult it is to understand a city too large and complicated for any single image.

That tension is what makes his work so compelling.

Photography stops time.

Robbert Flick spent decades finding ways to make it move again.