CRAIG GRITZEN PHOTOGRAPHY / FIELD. NOTES. LA. / 0020 / CULVER CITY / 2026
Culver City, Between the Screen and the Street
A photographic reading of a city where studio history, creative architecture, hospitality, and after-hours life occupy the same frame.
Los Angeles, 2026.
Culver City is often introduced through the movies.
I wanted to photograph the city around that story: the streets, structures, and gathering places that make it feel lived in now.
Downtown holds the presence of an older Los Angeles. Near Helms Bakery District, the scale turns more industrial. In Hayden Tract, architecture becomes a subject in its own right. At night, bars and hotel interiors offer another kind of frame, shaped by warm light and the pause between one part of the day and the next.
This photo essay follows those changes in atmosphere. It is less a guide to Culver City than a record of what caught my eye while moving through it.
Downtown, the past remains part of the present.
The Culver Hotel opened in 1924, when Culver City was already closely tied to motion picture production. Thomas Ince built a major studio here in 1918. The city’s film history has continued through changing studio names and ownership, and the surrounding streets still hold that relationship between entertainment, business, and everyday life.
I’m interested in how a place like the hotel reads in different ways from outside and within. The exterior gives you its civic presence. The lobby, food, and drink bring the story down to human scale: a place to pause, meet, and inhabit rather than simply pass by.
A photograph can record a building. The sequence can show how a neighborhood feels to move through.
Architecture is the evidence.
Near Helms Bakery District and through Hayden Tract, the city’s industrial past and creative present sit in visible conversation. I look for the point where structure meets street: an edge, a shadow, a reflection, an unexpected form against the sky.
Rather than isolate a building as a clean object, I want the photograph to keep some of the context around it. Materials, scale, and the way a structure meets its surroundings all help convey how a place feels to move through. The frame can hold both the architecture and the life around it.
Culver City’s studios are part of that landscape too. Their presence connects the built environment to the work of making film and television, while the streets nearby remain full of ordinary routines and new uses.
Then the city shifts into evening.
Old Man Bar, The Washington, and Cinema Bar bring a more intimate register to the story. The light changes. The pace eases. A doorway or window starts to hold the frame differently. Cinema Bar, in particular, offers the kind of atmosphere that feels cinematic without needing to announce itself.
These are the details I keep returning to in editorial photography: the traces of use, the quality of light, the small visual tensions that make one place distinct from another. A photograph should do more than identify where you are. It should help someone sense what it might feel like to stand there.
