Bergamont Station is the center of the art market in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. It is a 5 1/2–acre site the city of Santa Monica bought as a park-and-ride stop for a Metro train that never arrived. Instead, the long, corrugated metal warehouse sheds were converted into 35 galleries, a museum, and a café, and the 350 parking spaces serve consumers of art rather than commuters. It is L.A.’s Chelsea.

There are differences between the art photography worlds of the two coasts. The first is one of scale. Photograph, the bi-monthly international guide to photography exhibitions, has 111 listings for New York City in its current issue. There are just 17 listings in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, including three for museum shows. Of the commercial galleries, four are in Bergamont Station. These are the Peter Feterman Gallery, RoseGallery, and Gallery Luisotti, which deal entirely in photography, and the Craig Krull Gallery, which specializes in photography, but shows works in other media as well.

Craig Krull was in his gallery space in Bergamont Station when the complex opened in 1994. Mr. Krull has observed the photography scene in Los Angeles for several decades, and represents many important area photographers. He has a keen sense of the history of photography and first hand knowledge of the ambitions of its local practitioners. He said the reason he sells artworks other than photography is that he is “interested in the uses of photography in the context of other arts.”

In Los Angeles, photography is not considered a discrete art, but is simply one option of many available to artists. Painters take pictures, photographers paint, and many artists incorporate photography as one part of multimedia efforts. There are many places to study photography in L.A. — including UCLA, the University of Southern California, California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), and the Art Center College of Design — but they all teach photography in relationship with other arts. There are no dedicated schools of photography, such as the one at the International Center of Photography in New York.

When I asked Mr. Krull what he thought were the differences between photography in Los Angeles and New York, he said he thought a more apt contrast was with the Group f/64 in the San Francisco Bay Area. Up the California coast, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and Willard Van Dyke set a standard of clear-eyed Straight Photography — a very formal aesthetic. In Los Angeles, things were more freewheeling, demotic, conceptual: simultaneously chaotic and spiritual. When asked if there was a tradition of street photographers in Los Angeles comparable to the grand tradition of New York City street photographers, Mr. Krull told me about Robbert Flick.

Mr. Flick (b. 1939 in Amersfoort, Holland) began his career in Los Angeles in the 1960s taking more or less generic street photographs, but presented them arranged in grids made up of 100 or more shots. He then realized that Angelenos ordinarily experience the city from their automobiles, so he attached a camera to the roof of his car and shot as he drove slowly along. Mr. Flick’s recent project on Pico Boulevard, a major street that runs between downtown Los Angeles and Santa Monica, incorporates thousands of individual color images mounted in huge grids that can be read as a text.

“Pico Boulevard” is certainly street photography, but it is totally alien to the intentions of Helen Levitt, Garry Winogrand, or William Klein: They are called “street photographers,” but their real subject is pedestrians and the drama of urban encounter. For Mr. Flick, it is the miles of structures lining the road that are of interest. He is a professor of fine arts at the University of Southern California, and a major influence on the region’s photography in the direction of conceptual art.

I told Mr. Krull that when I asked Weston Naef, a highly respected curator of photography at the J. Paul Getty Museum, what he thought was the main difference between photography in Los Angeles and New York, he said both cities have a great respect for the power of photographs to move people, but New York is the country’s center for advertising, and so a lot of its photography is about selling goods. Los Angeles is the center for movies, and although stars achieve recognition in their films, they rely on still photographs to maintain their celebrity. Mr. Krull immediately said, “Absolutely!”

Mr. Krull gave as an example the vogue in the 1960s for Los Angeles artists to put a photograph of themselves, rather than an image of their work, on invitations to exhibition openings. Celebrity photography was important not just to specialists like George Platt Lynes, but also to eccentric and bohemian artists such as Edmund Teske (1911–1996). Teske was born in Chicago, and moved to Los Angeles in 1943. He studied Vedantic Hinduism and developed artsy techniques he called “composite printing” and “duotone solarization.” But Teske, too, was interested in celebrity photos.

Teske’s portrait of avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger has him posed heroically at Topanga Canyon with his image superimposed on a Gustave Dore print of the rebel angels from Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” Teske’s picture of Jim Morrison shows his band, the Doors, gathered around him with El Greco’s “Last Supper” printed above: Morrison and Christ are surrounded by their disciples. Teske had a considerable impact on later L.A. photographers, including James Fee and Jo-Ann Callis, with his experimental techniques and spiritualism.

Mr. Krull said “the important thing to get about Los Angeles becoming a major world art center, is that it is always in a state of becoming.” There is, he said, a “wild sense of freedom,” with less concern for tradition, and where anything goes. The project, as they say in Hollywood, is in development.

wmeyers@nysun.com