Every Minute Is History: Five Views of Los Angeles at the Getty Center brings together five photographers who expanded the visual language of Chicano/a life in Los Angeles during the second half of the 20th century. On view from September 1, 2026, through January 3, 2027, in the Museum West Pavilion’s lower level, the exhibition presents work by Laura Aguilar, Reynaldo Rivera, George Rodriguez, Patssi Valdez and Ricardo Valverde, each of whom approached the medium with distinct strategies and ambitions.
The photographers draw from social documentary practices, staged scenes, fashion imagery and the popular press, yet they resist narrow definitions of community representation. Their images move between public spaces and private interiors, capturing family gatherings, street life, performance, portraiture and the quiet moments that often go unrecorded. The result is a layered portrait of a city shaped by migration, labor, creativity and resistance.
Laura Aguilar’s self-portraits and intimate photographs confront stereotypes about gender, race and class with directness and vulnerability. Reynaldo Rivera’s work documents queer Latino life, nightlife and social networks in Los Angeles, preserving scenes that were rarely visible in mainstream media. George Rodriguez combines documentary rigor with a painterly sense of composition, photographing neighborhoods, cultural events and everyday encounters with sustained attention.
Patssi Valdez stages scenes that blend performance, humor and critique, using photography to question expectations placed on Chicana women and to explore identity as something constructed and performed. Ricardo Valverde’s images record community activism, cultural celebrations and the textures of East Los Angeles, creating an archive of place that feels both personal and collective.
Presented in English and Spanish, the exhibition acknowledges the bilingual reality of the communities it depicts. At the Getty, Every Minute Is History does not offer a single narrative of Chicano/a Los Angeles. Instead, it presents five distinct ways of seeing, each one insisting that ordinary moments carry historical weight and that photography can hold both memory and possibility at once.
Image: Detail: Lotería de Muertos. 1983; printed 1993, Ricardo Valverde. Hand-colored gelatin silver print. Getty Museum. © Esperanza Valverde and Christopher Jude Valverde
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