At Pace Gallery in Los Angeles, David Lynch’s photography reveals a darker, stranger and deeply personal vision of the city he called home for more than 50 years.
There is a particular kind of Los Angeles that belongs to David Lynch.
It is not the city of postcards, palm trees and Hollywood glamour. It is the city behind the city: abandoned stairwells, industrial edges, obscure architecture, deserted interiors, artificial light, smoke and bodies that seem to belong to another dimension.
That Los Angeles is now at the centre of David Lynch: LA, a major exhibition of the artist’s photography currently on view at Pace Gallery in Los Angeles.
Running from September 19 through December 23, 2026, the exhibition brings together 35 photographic works from five series made between 1979 and 2008. It is the first exhibition devoted exclusively to Lynch’s photography in his adopted city, and the first presentation of his work there since his death in 2025.
Photography was only one part of Lynch’s extraordinarily broad artistic practice. Before becoming internationally known as the director of Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive, Lynch had wanted to be a painter. He never really stopped being one.
His photography feels like an extension of that instinct.
LOS ANGELES, WITHOUT THE POSTCARD
Lynch arrived in Los Angeles in 1972 and remained there for more than half a century. The city became inseparable from his visual imagination.
But rather than photographing its obvious landmarks, he often searched for places that appeared almost insignificant.
A staircase, a shopfront, a wall, a piece of industrial machinery, a forgotten building.
The ordinary becomes strange simply because Lynch looks at it differently.
According to his son Riley Sweeney Lynch, his father sometimes went out with a very simple objective: photographing a certain number of images within a certain amount of time. He treated these photographic walks almost as a treasure hunt.
That idea is essential to understanding the photographs.
Lynch does not appear to be searching for spectacular subjects. He is searching for possibilities.
A seemingly empty corner can contain a story. An abandoned building can become a stage. A piece of architecture can acquire a psychological presence.
THE BODY BECOMES LANDSCAPE
The exhibition becomes considerably stranger when Lynch turns his camera toward the human body.
In Untitled (Nudes and Smoke), a woman’s face fills the frame while smoke emerges from her red-painted mouth. There is no obvious source for the smoke. It seems almost to have become part of her.
The image is sensual, disturbing and deliberately ambiguous.
Pace describes the Figures and Smoke series as one of the central bodies of work in the exhibition, with large-scale colour photographs in which women’s faces are tightly cropped and smoke becomes almost an atmospheric element in the image.
Lynch repeatedly refuses to let the human body remain simply human.
His black-and-white nudes transform the body into something closer to a landscape: curves, shadows, folds and fragments rather than conventional portraits of a person.
In the Couch Series, this becomes even more pronounced. Lynch photographed a reclining nude and manipulated the image through multiple exposures, creating strange, blurred bodies that seem to multiply and dissolve into one another.
The reference to the classical reclining nude is there, but Lynch takes the tradition somewhere entirely unexpected.
THE SMOKE ON THE COUCH
One of the exhibition’s most immediately memorable images is Smoke on Couch (1992).
At first glance, it seems almost absurdly simple: a couch, a domestic interior and an inexplicable column of smoke.
But that is precisely where Lynch’s photography operates.
Nothing happens. And yet something clearly has happened.
The photograph creates the sensation of an event that has taken place just outside the frame, or perhaps one that exists only inside the viewer’s imagination.
This is where Lynch’s photography and cinema meet without becoming cinematic illustrations.
He doesn’t need actors, dialogue or movement.
The photograph creates the mystery itself.
THE EVERYDAY, DISMANTLED
The final body of work in the exhibition may be the most unexpected.
For his Kits series, Lynch photographed dissected animals arranged almost like model airplane components.
A fish, a chicken or a duck is taken apart, photographed and accompanied by instructions suggesting how the pieces might be put back together.
The idea apparently came from Lynch’s childhood fascination with model kits and the pleasure of understanding how things are constructed.
It is grotesque, funny and strangely methodical.
And it reveals something important about Lynch.
Behind the dream-maker was an artist fascinated by how things work.
He could take apart an image, a body, an object or an idea and reconstruct it into something that was recognisable but fundamentally wrong.
That tension between the familiar and the uncanny is perhaps the thread running through the entire exhibition.
A PHOTOGRAPHER HIDING INSIDE THE FILMMAKER
For decades, David Lynch’s reputation as a filmmaker largely overshadowed his visual art.
That is beginning to change.
Pace’s exhibition is part of a broader reassessment of Lynch’s artistic career. The gallery notes that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is already preparing a major Lynch retrospective, currently in discussion with other museums.
But David Lynch: LA does something more specific.
It allows us to look at Lynch without the safety net of cinema.
There are no actors. No soundtrack. No editing. No dialogue.
Just a photograph.
And suddenly the same questions return: What happened here? Who was here? What are we looking at? Why does this ordinary place feel threatening? Why does this body appear both beautiful and disturbing?
Perhaps that is the real subject of the exhibition.
Not Los Angeles itself.
But the feeling of Los Angeles as experienced through the imagination of David Lynch.
He once described the city’s light as something that thrilled him. In his photographs, however, light is never simply light. It becomes atmosphere, memory, menace and possibility.
Lynch did not photograph the city he saw.
He photographed the city he felt.
Grégory Herpe
David Lynch: LA
Pace Gallery Los Angeles
1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles
September 19 – December 23, 2026
Image captions:
David Lynch, Untitled (Nudes and Smoke), c. 1994. © The David Lynch Estate. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
David Lynch, Smoke on Couch, 1992. © The David Lynch Estate. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
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