eastside living LA

Capturing Light and Emotion

Photographer Ryan Herz Exhibits Desert Christ Park

By Andrea Alegría

There’s something about the way the light hits the white concrete statues. They appear to glow in the bright blue desert sky, coating some of his photographs with an aura of divinity. 

But imparting religious propaganda is not what Ryan Herz’s photo essay of Desert Christ Park sets out to do. Instead, this photographer, who calls himself an atheist, takes an artful look at a place charged with symbolism, as well as historical and cultural significance.

His photographs, on display at the DRKRM Gallery in Glassell Park from April 11- May 24, capture Desert Christ Park, a 3 ½ acre spot in the Yucca Valley, less than 30 miles northeast of Palm Springs, where 55 larger-than-life-size religious figures have been strewn about for more than 50 years now. 

It was this place that, back in 1951, artist-sculptor Antone Martin dedicated as a shrine to world peace. Martin sculpted these statues during the height of the A-bomb scare in the mid 1940’s and used steel reinforced concrete and white cement plaster finish, hoping that the statues – each weighing between three and sixteen tons – would survive a nuclear bomb. 

“Take a look at this one,” says Herz, while framing and hanging photographs at the gallery on a recent Sunday afternoon, setting up for the exhibition.

“This is one that obviously has a religious feeling to it, it almost looks like a holy card you could have gotten at the back of a pew, yet there’s no doubt it’s a statue. So how does that happen, and why do you get that feeling from what you know is a statue?” he wonders aloud.

The 62 year-old artist stares at a photograph that depicts a 15-foot-tall Christ, reminiscent of Rio de Janeiro’s hilltop Christ the Redeemer, standing on a hill, his arms raised high over the valley, against a luminous blue sky.

As a photographer, he marvels at the elements that come together, sometimes by luck, that make one frame, shot perhaps one second after another one, so unique and rendering a completely different emotion. 

“There’s something about the desert light and the emotion,” he says, almost to himself.

A Los Angeles native with a Catholic upbringing, he was intrigued by the religious figures at Desert Christ Park. He has felt drawn to religious figures ever since he was a kid, he says, despite the fact that he doesn’t believe in God and takes a more Darwinian approach to explain life’s greater purpose.

“One of my first photography projects, back when I was a kid, happened when my mother’s statue of the Virgin Mary accidentally fell and lost its head. I thought, ‘Gee, this is great!’ and started taking photos of it.” 

In his series of 30 photographs on Desert Christ Park, Herz captures statues of disciples listening to the Sermon on the Mount, apostles and other biblical characters in discussion or contemplation. He also photographs a 20-foot-high, 30-foot-long bas relief of the Last Supper. 

True to his style, the photographs are mostly wide shots. Herz steers clear of close-ups, giving the viewer a more complete perspective of his subject.

“I’m always back, you see that in all my work, and I never crop my work. Once you put that after-shooting mentality on an image I think you loose something, you loose the purity, sometimes chance has a little to do with it, whether it’s an inch this way or that way, and that’s a good thing. When you make it totally controlled it doesn’t work as well for me.”

And like his past work, Herz says his photos on Desert Christ Park are also laced with elements of surrealism, especially in how he seeks to strip ordinary objects of their normal significance.

“For me, photography is about finding moments that can transcend what’s necessarily happening and that give the viewer and the photographer a completely different view on things.” 

Aside from the emotional and cultural implications of the statues, Herz also captures the passage of time at Desert Christ Park, with its earthquakes and ideological shifts. 

Some of the photographs in his series are in black and white and date back to 1968, the year when he first came across the park on his way to a UFO convention. Some 36 years later he returned to shoot color photos on a digital camera, infusing his pictures with the traditional Christian color scheme of rich blue and white, and also capturing the changes through the years.

“I went back and seeing the condition of the park now made it more interesting to me,” he says.

Neglect, vandalism, and the 1992 earthquake hurt the statues over time, some of which lost their heads, or look like stick figures with metal poles for feet and hands. A nonprofit organization has been working to repair some of the statues, but the repairs have given way to ideological shifts, Herz says, distorting the original artists more secular vision for the place. In some instances the statues’ legs, an element that made them look like ordinary people, have been fully covered.

“Desert Christ Park originally had secular figures and they’ve changed them all, they took the artists vision and completely changed it,” says Herz, who likes the idea that the original sculptor depicted Jesus as a man, living life among ordinary men and women.

An “atheist who loves gospel music”, Herz can go on and on about his views on religion, but in the end, he says, his photo essay is about art.

“If a born again and an atheist can both see things they like in the show then I would consider it a success.” 

Herz, who’s held a myriad of jobs throughout his life including working as a mechanic, and a cook, traveling with a Renaissance Fair and owning a fabric and trim import business that supports the local garment industry, says nothing has been more important in to him than photography.

“Some of the most important moments of my life I’ve experienced with a camera and shutter,” he says. “There’s a sense of finality, a sense of purpose. There’s something about that moment that makes you realize why you were there, that everything came together for that one brief second and you were able to capture it.”

The photographer, who attended the Art Center in Pasadena and the San Francisco Art Institute, has been exhibited locally and in San Francisco, New Orleans and New York,

His previous work exhibited at DRKRM Gallery includes an essay titled Children of Edgewood, which captures haunting, disturbing and beautiful images of children in a facility for the developmentally disabled. Herz shot these pictures back in 1976 when he was hired to take ID photos for the patients at a facility, giving him a unique opportunity to document a fragment of humanity the public at large rarely, if ever, sees. The images show patients suffering from a range of disabilities including mental retardation, severe autism, Down’s syndrome and brain damage.

Other notable photo essays include Desert Pool, a collection of underwater photographs that capture light and shadows in a pool; Route 5, and Women on Display, an expose of Hollywood’s Ivar Theatre in the 1970’s.

drkrm gallery is an exhibition space dedicated to fine art and documentary photography, cutting edge and alternative photographic processes and the display and survey of popular cultural images.

On display concurrently in the Project Room: R.H. Sturges’ At the End of the Pavement: Churches of the American South.

drkrm Gallery • 2121 San Fernando Road, Suite 3, Los Angeles, CA 90065 • 323-223-6867 • drkrmgallery@gmail.com • www.drkrm.com/gallery