The job of a gallery curator is not just to bring together the best images, but to arrange them in a way that gives us new perspectives on them.
If Getty's new exhibition has a theme, I'd say it's that the history of Chicano/a photography in Los Angeles is not all grainy documentary shots of marches and protest signs. It's far more varied, intimate and unexpected than that.
For non-US readers unfamiliar with the term, Chicano (masculine) and Chicana (feminine) generally describe people living in the United States who are of Mexican descent.
This does not necessarily mean they or their family are immigrants. Parts of what are now California and Texas, among other states, were once part of Mexico, hence the oft-used phrase: "We didn't cross the border, the border crossed us."
Getty's new exhibition, Every Minute Is History: Five Views of Los Angeles, brings together Laura Aguilar, Reynaldo Rivera, George Rodriguez, Patssi Valdez and Ricardo Valverde.
These five photographers refused to settle on one way of working and, between them, built a more varied and expansive record of the City of Angels than any single one could have achieved.
Each to their own
George Rodriguez shot police lines and picket signs. Patssi Valdez staged elaborate, theatrical scenes in her own apartment.
Reynaldo Rivera photographed drag performers backstage at LA nightclubs. Laura Aguilar's subject was her own body. Ricardo Valverde hand-colored his prints and painted directly onto them.
None of them were trying to do the same thing at all: this wasn't a movement with a house style. Instead, this was a scene where very different instincts all found their subject in the same communities.
Rodriguez's photographs sit at one end of the spectrum: straight reportage, shot on the ground at events such as the 1966 Sunset Strip riots and at United Farm Workers actions in Delano, where men lean against a car holding hand-painted placards that pay tribute to Cesar Chavez – one of the most biggest labor and civil rights leaders in US history, and a central figure in the Chicano Movement.
Valdez is at the other end entirely. Her images from backstage at a theater showcase performers mid-transformation, buried in paper costumes and half-applied makeup; the scene so cluttered it takes a moment to find the face in it. These aren't documents of an event so much as constructions of a mood.
Aguilar's Clothed / Unclothed series does something different again: it turns the camera on the artist's family and her own body, presenting the same figures, dressed and undressed, side by side. Her Latina Lesbians portraits go further still, pairing a straightforward headshot with a handwritten statement from the sitter, so the photograph doesn't have to speak alone.
Valverde and Rivera occupy their own strange middle ground. Valverde's Dances with Muertos and his hand-painted Integrated School collage treat the photograph as raw material to be altered after the fact.
While Rivera's nightclub portraits, of performers including Gaby at La Plaza, capture LA's queer Latino nightlife with an intimacy that only comes from being inside the room.
Seen together, it's all a reminder that a community's history is not a monoculture – and that those who capture it best are often those who seek out the interesting stuff, in the corners and cracks.
Every Minute Is History: Five Views of Los Angeles runs at the Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles, from September 01 2026 to January 03 2027. The exhibition is presented in English and Spanish. Admission is free, but timed entry tickets need to be booked in advance.
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