#jimmchugh

Iconic Photographer

Jim McHugh

 Jim McHugh is a widely acclaimed portrait, lifestyle and fine art photographer. Jim is one of the original Contributing Photographers to People Magazine. Jim attended the master’s program at the UCLA Film School. He started his work at People during the magazine’s very beginnings in the mid-1970s. Jim worked with the Grammy Awards for a decade creating “The Grammy Image Project”, a series of unique celebrity images and a traveling exhibition that chronicled the history of contemporary music.

Jim McHugh lives in Los Angeles with his wife Johnna and daughter Chloe.  

Main Works: -

He has created award winning portraits of Samuel L. Jackson, Clint Eastwood, and Sir Anthony Hopkins. A unique series of environmental portraits by Jim McHugh has appeared on the covers of Architectural Digest. This series includes Candice Bergen, Tina Turner, Wynona Rider, Kelsey Grammer, Sen. and Mrs. John McCain and Anjelica Huston.

In the past few years Jim has dedicated much of his time to photographing the urban ‘built environment’ as a “vanishing landscape.” These evocative architectural Polaroid photographs have been exhibited at Louis Stern Fine Arts and the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles. They have also been shown at Acte 2 Gallery in Paris. 10 images are included in the Polaroid Permanent Collection.

 Publications: -

McHugh has published several books on Contemporary Art and Artists, including, “California Painters: New Work” and” The Art of Light and Space”.

His artist’s portraits of David Hockney, Richard Diebenkorn and Sam Francis among others are in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, NY, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Walker Art Institute in Minneapolis. McHugh had his first one man show at the James Corcoran Gallery in Los Angeles in 1984.

“Artists’ Portraits” was a comprehensive photographic survey of the Los Angeles artist world. His photograph of David Hockney was the portrait used by the George Pompidou Centre in Paris for their grand reopening.  Another Hockney portrait was recently acquired by The National Portrait Gallery in London.

 Expositions: -

Jim’s special interest is the combining of traditional and digital techniques to create fine art prints. He is director of the annual juried exhibition “Camera Works” for the APA-Los Angeles and serves on the Board’s Copyright Committee

 “He sees through his lens darkly, and evocatively, capturing a noir Los Angeles saturated with atmosphere and a hazy ambiguity. His eye prefers crepuscular light, and dawn, and it monumentalizes LA by treating buildings, even signs, as icons that create a city of stature. He chooses to see a more heroic Los Angeles, when the buildings and the signs were the larger-than-life stars of a city… when Wilshire Boulevard was a mile of miracles.”

– Joseph Giovannini, New York Times art critic 

Jim McHugh's large format photographs are moody, elegiac studies of urban landscapes and architectural detail, exploring the themes of loss and urban entropy. He has a deep appreciation for the inexplicable darkness that haunts this famously sunny, palm-shaded city. 

– Lynn Morgan, Art and Living 

 Awards: -

 Jim McHugh has garnered many awards for his photography and is included in prominent collections such as The Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Center, The Polaroid Collection, and the National Portrait Gallery in London. He has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. 

In 2004 Jim won Graphis Photography Award for Architecture with his unique image of architect Albert Frey’s mid-century “Filling Station in Palm Springs.”  Jim also received first prize from the International Photography Awards in 2004 for his images of Los Angeles.  July 2007 Prix de la Photographie Paris 1st Prize for Fine Art Portraiture “Photos of David Hockney”  International Photography Awards  1st Prize Fine Art  1st Prize Landscape  Best of Show  selected by Anthony Bannon George Eastman House, Rochester  2007

In 2010, the United Nations honored him with the IPC Professional Photography Leadership Award. Jim also won The International Photography Awards’ First Prize for Fine Art Photography 2007, and George Eastman House awarded him Best of Show in 2008 for architectural imagery of Los Angeles.