Brought up in a military family, John Humble spent his childhood moving around the country from one military base to another. Humble was drafted during the Vietnam War, then became a photojournalist for the Washington Post before pursuing a graduate degree at the San Francisco Art Institute. His itinerant nature continued when he traveled the world in the early 1970s, going from Europe to the Middle East, then to Africa and Asia in his Volkswagen van. However, since the summer of 1974 Humble has lived in one place: Los Angeles.

In 1979, Humble acquired a 4x5 view camera and began to photograph the Los Angeles that he perceived every day — a Los Angeles that tourists seldom see, and that locals seldom notice. “These pictures depict the reality that the majority of people in Los Angeles experience as commonplace,” Humble writes. “The images themselves are not complex; for the most part they are quite simple, and present a set of facts which are intuitively connected by the act of putting a frame around the world. The experience of looking at one of my photographs should be similar to the experience of looking through a window.”