From celebrity signings to graffiti tags: Josh Kun's 'The Autograph Book' examines the evolution of L.A.'s signature.
The roots of this new autograph book can be traced back more than 100 years. Shortly after former Los Angeles Librarian Charles Fletcher Lummis trekked more than 2,000 miles on foot from Ohio to Los Angeles, he began racking up signatures from notable figures. John Muir, Will Rogers and Clarence Darrow were among the intellectuals, artists, scientists and numerous others who attended Lummis’ house parties and filled the pages of his guest book.
He writes, “[W]ords and names are not words and names. They are vessels that carry the bodies and lives embedded within them forward in time. They are statements of presence and wishes for endurance, reminders that those who came before cannot so easily be made to disappear.” The book includes photographs of murals and graffiti from throughout the 20th century, with images of autographs, poems, letters and drawings from Lummis’ collection juxtaposed with photos of recent signatures. When Kun and Szabo reached out to the public last year, hundreds of Angelenos participated in the library’s Autograph Day. And in the process, they redefined the idea of “People Who Count.
“That impulse of surrounding oneself with a network of famous people to make yourself famous, and make that city famous, is pre-Kardashian,” he said “and it’s also at the core of social media culture where we tag famous people in our posts to make people notice us. “And that impulse of saying like, ‘I want you to see me because I see you,’ that’s something that Lummis was doing in deep analog form in the early 1900s.”These ideas about visibility and remembrance reverberate through “The Autograph Book of L.A.'s” pages and beg the question: Whose stories are told and preserved, and whose are erased and ignored?Information: “The Autograph Book of L.A.” exhibit runs through Jan. 19 at the Central Library’s First Floor Galleries, 630 W. 5th St.
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