Bruce Davidson, around L.A.

The 76-year-old New York photographer is "among the leaders of a loose-knit new wave of photographers — including Lee Friedlander, Danny Lyon, Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus — who emerged in the early 1960s with the desire to tell stories that didn’t fit neatly, and often didn’t fit at all, into the art world or into the magazine picture-essay tradition." Davidson has been doing a lot of shooting in Los Angeles recently, today's New York Times says.

Over the last several months Mr. Davidson has been making frequent trips to Los Angeles to further his landscape interests, what he describes as a “lifelong urban rat’s” preoccupation with nature meeting the manufactured, which he has also pursued for many years in Central Park and in Paris. Though the work mostly requires waiting patiently for the right light, one recent trip to the West found him equipped with rappelling gear, navigating his way with a helper down a steep slope in the Hollywood Hills to shoot the back of the Hollywood sign, which looks like a strangely familiar minimalist sculpture in his pictures.

“It’s not that I’ve given up on photographing people,” he said of his turn to landscape. “But I guess I just need a break from it for a while.”

He's "a vigorous, round-faced man given to wearing heavy work shirts and boots that lend him the appearance of a carpenter," If you spot him, say hello. This month the German art-book publisher Steidl issues a three-volume retrospective of Davidson’s photographs.

Photo: Runyon Canyon Road 2008, by Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos via New York Times and Howard Greenberg Gallery