Since the mid-’70s, Robbert Flick has played a crucial role in the growth of Southern California’s photographic culture and its conversion into art-world currency. In the most traditional documentary sense, his practice is determined by subject or genre, specifically the transformation of the urban landscape over time. Accordingly, he provides a complex record for posterity, typically unfolding in sequential, gridded arrangements that suggest the mobile point of view of cinema and point inward as much as out. Ostensibly consistent, each work (and site) is in fact subjected to a markedly different structural principle. The eighty-seven prints and photographic groups on view in this, his first retrospective, may finally allow us to measure the aging of our cities and suburbs against that of Flick’s conceptual system(s).

— Jan Tumlir