If you made a list of things disdained by a certain breed of cultural snob, Los Angeles and late modern architecture would both rank up there near the top. That’s nonsense, of course, and a new monograph, Wayne Thom: Photographing the Late Modern (Monacelli, $60) can dispel both prejudices at once.
Thom made an art of shooting the crisp, glassy work, much of it corporate, produced in California from the 1960s through 1980s. His sense of the sky, of color and reflection, gave visual drama, but also humanity and humor, to a class of work deemed soulless but now coming in for reevaluation.
Late modern in Dallas
Dallas is defined by this late modern period, and taking Thom’s photographs as inspiration, architecture critic Mark Lamster visited a few of the defining works of that period that still give shape to this city.
