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 captures Los Angeles in a simpler time. He evokes in these luminous, elegant photographs the Los Angeles of our memories.
– Barbara Isenberg, author of 'Conversations with Frank Gehry'
Jim McHugh follows in the footsteps of photography giant Ansel Adams.
– Vanity Fair
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
Acclaimed photographer Jim McHugh is heir to a particular experience and vision of Los Angeles that's all romance, noir, silhouetted buildings, and casual luxury. With his knack for photographing buildings in the intimate style of a portraitist, and in such a way as to erase all traces of intervening history, McHugh's photographs capture the ghost of what was — and might be again — LA's promise of beauty and the sunny, shadowy, glittering character of America in its vintage red-carpet regalia.
– Shana Nys Dambrot, Flavorpill New York