Dennis Feldman: Hollywood Boulevard: 1969-1972

For three years, Dennis Feldman (born 1946) repeatedly walked an eight-block stretch from Hollywood and Vine to the Chinese Theater, called the Walk of Fame, where people flocked to gaze at a sidewalk full of terrazzo stars inlaid with the names of famous (and no longer famous) entertainers. He became obsessed with photographing the characters that gathered there, drawn to the world of stardom, parading their self-made identities—macho and gay, masculine and feminine, biker and hippy—modeled after American archetypes molded by the entertainment industry and the social revolution of the 1960s. Hollywood Boulevard compiles the photographer's large-format, black-and-white portraits into a painfully human character study of social identity and performance.