Look up Tim Street-Porter’s 1986 photograph Hills Above Sunset Strip—but only for a moment, or you might end up putting aside LARA for the day.
A lone, larger-than-life Marlboro Man—starkly cropped in, lasso in an outstretched hand—gallops across the shrubland of the Hollywood Hills West, his steed chafing at the weight of the company’s red-over-white serif logo. If it were lit, the cigarette in the wrangler’s mouth could conceivably set the splotchy, sepia slopes ablaze, imperiling the homes on the ridge behind the billboard. A thin line separates danger from bravura, however, and some of the dwellings, propped up on stilts and set atop improbable peaks, positively flaunt their precariousness. Foreground and background: Each confidently promises a lifestyle of glamorized risk and rugged individuation.
One lonesome cowboy notwithstanding, Street-Porter’s photo actually discloses very little about the Sunset Strip itself. An ambling fragment of Sunset Boulevard stretching less than two miles, the Strip has been swarming with advertisements of every imaginable size a…