LAUSANNE.-Musee de l'Elysée presents today This Side of Paradise: Los Angeles (1865-2008), on view through April 19, 2009. «Imagine Marilyn Monroe, fifty miles long, lying on her side, half-buried on a ridge of crumbling rock, the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains, with chaparral, flowers and snakes writhing over her body, and mists, smog, or dreams gathering in every curve. You'd need a certain height to recognize that intricate course as a body. But that's Mulholland Drive... It's about as long as on old movie, and as full of scents and half-grasped fears as Marilyn's drowsy state. » -David Thomson

The body and the landscape, inextricably, sensuously intertwined - two themes which run through this multifaceted 'portrait' of Los Angeles. Los Angeles: City of Angels... and Demons. For the lucky few, the beautiful, the well-born, a utopia - endless sunshine, beaches and swimming pools, peopled by vigorous, healthy bodies; for many others, a dystopia - endless, clogged freeways, smog, fearfulness, a city without a center, or (it is sometimes said), a soul. In the skies above, glittering Hollywood stars; on the hard pavements below, ever-present terror of earthquake and social unrest. Dream or nightmare? Fact or fiction? Perhaps the truth of this quixotic, haunting place lies somewhere between the perceived extremes.

This complex, sprawling city has long fascinated photographers of many stripes: studio professionals, industrial photographers, photojournalists, fashion and glamour photographers, amateurs, tourists and art photographers. The exhibition offers the widest possible range of these approaches. It features more than a hundred famous and unknown photographers who together have documented, imagined, celebrated, criticized and mythologized the city from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.

There are seven sections to the exhibition: Garden, Move, Work, Dwell, Play, Clash, and Dream. These sections are meant to help us think about key aspects of life in Los Angeles, aspects which touch everyone, rich or poor, in fundamental ways. However, the seven sections are only meant as a rough guide to the rich pictorial terrain, and viewers are encouraged to strike out on their own journey through the highways and the byways of this compelling city.