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Matinee: 'Pat O'Neill's Photo Edition'
29 November 2025
Saturday matinees long ago let us escape from the ordinary world to the island of the Swiss Family Robinson or the mutinous decks of the Bounty. Why not, we thought, escape the usual fare here with Saturday matinees of our favorite photography films?
So we're pleased to present the 632nd in our series of Saturday matinees today: Pat O'Neill's Photo Edition.
We're offering you a double feature today. In the first show (above), Graham Howe, CEO of Curatorial, talks about a collaboration between himself and Pat O'Neill, who he describes as a multimedia artist. Because O'Neill works in cinema, print making, sculpture and photography.
It's a nice 2:53 introduction to O'Neill's photography of the 1960s and it deals solely with his black-and-white photography of the 1960s in Los Angeles and San Francisco primarily.
But if that wets you appetite for more O'Neill, we found a what seems to be the longer interview the introduction borrowed from. Which we unfortunately can't embed.
In the longer 9:50 video, we watch a slide show of O'Neill's images as he talks about each one. What interested him, what it seems to depict (because he's only guessing) and on to the next.
The 30 images have been exhibited in Cars and Other Problems with an accompanying volume of the same name published by Curatorial.
"Seen with irony and dry wit, Pat O'Neill's photographs of automobiles, billboards, storefronts, torn posters, graffiti and car junkyards provide a fresh and often humorous window into 1960s car culture," the liner notes promise.
"A native of Los Angeles, the spiritual homeland of the motor vehicle, O'Neill found his enigmatic images across the paved metropolitan wastelands of his own city, and on cross-country road trips. Revealing a palpable discontent beneath the surface of the nation's brave new image, these photographs stand alone as insightful visions of the mid-twentieth century urban landscape, designed for, and scaled to, the automobile."
We had to sensation Walker Evans had visited California vernacular in the 1960s to record the way we lived then in what we had left behind.