Art

About the Artist
Larry Yust was born in Philadelphia, grew up in the suburbs of New York and Chicago, graduated with a degree in theater from Stanford. He and his wife have three children and live in Los Angeles where he has worked for many years as a writer and director of motion pictures. In fact, it was Yust's film career that led him to develop his unique photographic style.

In Paris to shoot a film based on a story by Ernest Hemingway, he was taken aback by the diversity of architectural styles of the Metro and decided to photograph them. Walking up and down the platforms of the Parisian metro stations, he was confronted with a particular challenge. Yust wanted to photograph the stations in one piece, something he could do in film by trucking a motion picture camera along the platform, but how to do it in a still photograph? He rejected the idea of a panoramic shot because the distortion would be too severe. He wanted to create a photograph that one could never see in real life, where every section of the station could be seen frontally. Yust's solution to this challenge led to the development of what he calls his Photographic Elevations.

Yust makes his Photographic Elevations by walking or riding along a line parallel to the subject while shooting overlapping shots with his camera always aimed directly at the subject. Back at his computer, Yust then assembles the individual shots in to a single image. The number of shots in one of his elevations ranges from ten to a hundred or more depending on the size and complexity of the subject.

Photographic Elevations are not the same as panoramic shots, which are taken from a single point of view, because wherever you look at the elevation, you are viewing the subject straight on with a minimum of distortion. It is a view that is impossible to achieve in nature and is therefore one that provides a different way of viewing the world.

Yust has had one man show at the LA County Museum of Science and Industry, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, commercial galleries in Germany, France, and New York, as well as at the Louvre in Paris. His work is on permanent display at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. His photographs have also been published in three books - Metro, The Beautiful Walls, and Streets Tell Stories.

The result was a shift to photography as an independent medium with his first museum exhibition in 1992 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Science and Industry.