I was at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently and went to see a retrospective exhibit of work by photographer Robbert Flick. I had seen some of his work before and was curious about its visual resemblance to comic book or story board layouts.

According to the curator's notes, Flick found single image photographs to be dissatisfying and started to develop different techniques to illustrate context through multiple images. As I walked through the show, it was interesting to view the chronological development of Flick's worlds.

An early selection of photos was called "Sequential Views," and showed how Flick used the urban street grid to develop a path for taking multiple photographs of an area from different vantage points. Having mapped his path, he would then follow it, taking photographs at given geographic and temporal points.

Los Angeles is the subject of many of Flick's photographs. I liked his colorful images of downtown Los Angeles, as seen in this small selection from a series of photos taken along Central Avenue.

Interestingly, the same technique applied to a rural setting has a completely different effect. In work documenting waves hitting a beach, in one instance, and a long stretch of empty highway in another, the consecutive photographs convey temporal steadiness or repetition. However, in the L.A. series, the images give a sense of constant motion and activity.