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ISBN 978-1-59005-453-6
Hardcover, Slipcased, 12 x 15, 56 pages, 43 four-color plates
Limited edition of 350 numbered and signed copies.

*NOTE: SPECIAL EDITION ALSO AVAILABLE HERE >

Brought up in a military family, John Humble spent his childhood moving around the country from one military base to another. Humble was drafted during the Vietnam War, then became a photojournalist for the Washington Post before pursuing a graduate degree at the San Francisco Art Institute. His itinerant nature continued when he traveled the world in the early 1970s, going from Europe to the Middle East, then to Africa and Asia in his Volkswagen van. However, since the summer of 1974 Humble has lived in one place: Los Angeles.

In 1979, Humble acquired a 4x5 view camera and began to photograph the Los Angeles that he perceived every day — a Los Angeles that tourists seldom see, and that locals seldom notice. “These pictures depict the reality that the majority of people in Los Angeles experience as commonplace,” Humble writes. “The images themselves are not complex; for the most part they are quite simple, and present a set of facts which are intuitively connected by the act of putting a frame around the world. The experience of looking at one of my photographs should be similar to the experience of looking through a window.”

John Humble’s large-scale photographs have been exhibited and collected since the 1970s, and are included in the permanent collections of such institutions as the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; The LA County Museum of Art; and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Manifest Destiny is printed in a limited edition of 350 numbered, signed and slipcased copies.

“Focusing almost exclusively on the metropolitan landscape of Los Angeles for the past 18 years, Humble's impressive output of colour photographs does for LA by day what Brassai did for Paris by night." — Carmine Iannoccone, Frieze

“Over the last 30 years, John Humble has photographed Los Angeles as if he were making a great, multifaceted portrait of someone he loved. His crystalline pictures find beauty, romance and empathy, as well as enchantment, surprise and delight, where you’d least expect it: in the buildings, roads and overpasses we routinely drive by. Humble’s laser-sharp prints reveal as much about the character and substance of Los Angeles as they do about his sensibility and perspective. His open-minded attitude is animated by calm curiosity, keen attentiveness and the patience to wait for those loaded moments when everything falls into place and serendipity delivers insights beyond words.” — David Pagel, L.A. Times