Untitled, from the series "Cannery Row"

Primarily known for his photographs of landscapes and ancient architecture in the American Southwest, William Current also spent a significant portion of his career in his native California. He first studied photography in Los Angeles, then moved to Laguna Beach, where he sought out Paul Outerbridge, a commercial photographer with connections in the art world, as a mentor. In the middle of his decades-long exploration of ruins in Arizona and New Mexico, Current returned to California to photograph a different type of architectural decay at Cannery Row, the street of declining sardine factories in Monterey immortalized in the eponymous 1945 novel by John Steinbeck. Using the close-range, frontal approach characteristic of his work, here Current depicted the corrugated metal structure of a dilapidated building as an abstracted plane of forms and textures.