A recent story in the New Yorker provided a lot more detail about “Double Standard,” a now-iconic photograph from inside a car of a Los Angeles gas station at a Route 66 intersection by actor Dennis Hopper during the early 1960s.
Here’s an Instagram image of the photo on display in London:
Writer Mark Rozzo described the photograph this way:
At a multi-way intersection, traffic lights and directional signage jostle for attention. A billboard declares that “Smart women cook with Gas in Balanced Power Homes.” A pedestrian stands at a crosswalk while a ’61 Chevy Impala faces across an expanse of blacktop, seeming to stare directly into the camera lens. Two avenues, lined with utility poles, fork and recede toward a mountainous horizon. Overhead power lines—twenty of them at least—slice the image along laserlike diagonals; they look like the perspective lines that an artist draws and then erases out of a picture. Any illusion of depth they create is countered by how the entire overstuffed panorama is framed in windshield glass, which flattens the picture and indicates that it was shot from the driver’s seat of a car. A rearview mirror reveals idling traffic behind: we’re at a stop. Dead ahead, a pair of “Standard” signs — of the type that once marked the ubiquitous service stations of Los Angeles — spreads open like albatross wings. (The advertised price of gas is 30.9¢ a gallon.) If anything can be said to anchor this compositional mess, a boisterous vision that seems hellbent on atomizing our gaze, it’s those two signs which give the photograph its punning title: “Double Standard.”
Though Hopper became best-known as the director of the counterculture film “Easy Rider” and for winning a supporting actor Oscar in “Hoosiers” years later, he also served as a key figure as a patron and a participant in the rise of pop art during the 1960s.
Hopper’s photography wasn’t amateur-level stuff, either. His images were featured in Vogue and Artforum magazines during that era.
Rozzo teased out these details about the “Double Standard” photograph:
- Hopper was driving in a Corvair convertible and stopped at a red light at the intersection with Melrose Avenue and North Doheny Drive in West Hollywood. He shot the photo with his 35mm Nikon right when the light turned green.
- Hopper said years later he particularly liked the Foster & Kleiser billboard that stated “Smart women cook with Gas in Balanced Power Homes.” “I liked the billboard. I liked the idea that the Route 66 sign was there, and it was just something I’d put off taking for a while. I drive so much in L.A., and I’m such a visual person, I just sort of collect things that I want to do, want to make,” he said.
- The photo frequently is listed as taken in 1961, but details from the negative and eyewitness accounts indicate the photo actually was taken between the fall of 1963 and late summer of 1964.
The Standard station is long gone. In case you’re wondering, here’s what the intersection looks like now.
“Double Standard” is at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, though prints also are displayed at other sites. You can buy a print, but it’ll cost you between $30,000 and $50,000.
(Hat tip to Michael Ross)