Shards of the city

Trying to define Los Angeles in photography is practically impossible. The city is so big. Its residents wildly diverse. How to edit all of that into a single 275-page book?

Somehow Jane Brown and Marla Hamburg Kennedy have done just that. In “Both Sides of Sunset: Photographing Los Angeles” [$75, Artbook/D.A.P.], they edit decades of photography about the city into one weighty tome.

Featuring the work of more than 125 artists from all over the world, the book contains images of L.A. that are classic and unknown: architectural photographer Julius Shulman’s dramatic images of the Department of Water and Power Building from the mid-1960s, and snaps of alleyways by contemporary L.A. photographer Peter Holzhauer.

There are conceptual images by John Baldessari, showing bright orange balls sailing above a horizon dotted with palm trees, and the journalistic pictures made by Douglas Kirkland, a Canadian-born photographer who shot for Look and Life magazines and who in 1970 captured actress Jeanne Moreau shooting a surreal scene from Paul Mazursky’s Hollywood fable “Alex in Wonderland.” There are moments of glamour and images that capture the city on days in which it looks as if it were beat with an ugly stick.

Times book critic David L. Ulin, writing the introduction, says “Both Sides of Sunset” is intended to “evoke L.A. in all its contradictory glory, its inexplicable and very human life.”

No overview of Los Angeles is ever going to be complete. Our city is too big, too atomized, too much of everything all at once. All we can ever see is one tiny bit of it at a time. And this book offers plenty of wondrous bits.