Ave Pildas
A native of Cincinnati, Ohio, Ave Pildas began his career as a photography stringer for Downbeat Magazine in the 1960's. In 1965 he moved to Switzerland to pursue graduate studies in graphic design at the legendary Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel, Switzerland under Armin Hoffman. He returned to the United States in 1968, and in 1971 moved to Los Angeles to work as an Art Director at Capitol Records. He launched a career as a freelance photographer and designer soon after, specializing in architectural photography.
Harper and Row published his book Art Deco Los Angeles in 1980, Crown Press (Clarkson Potter) published his Movie Palaces in 1982 and Nazrali Press published Bijoux in 2016. In 2022, Deadbeat Club Press published Star Struck, featuring Pildas’ photos of Hollywood Boulevard.
His photographs have been exhibited in galleries nationally and internationally and have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, ‘ZOOM’, ‘PHOTO’, ‘CAMERA’, ‘photographic’, The Guardian and other publications. They are also included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Bibliotheca National, Paris, the University of Arizona, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and numerous private collections. In 2023 his photography was featured in the New Yorker article “The Seedy Glamour of Nineteen-Seventies Hollywood”.
Pildas has taught design and photography courses at the Philadelphia College of Art, California Institute of the Arts, Art Center College of Design, Ravensborn School of Art, Leicester Polytechnic and most recently Otis College of Art and Design, where he held the position of Chair of the Communication Art Department from 2000 till 2008. A feature-length documentary titled “Ave’s America” by Patrick Taulere was released in 2022.
