But there are also pictures of everyday people in Los Angeles: a man leans into the welcoming light of a taco stand; a pool player, resting on his cue, is caught with his mouth agape, mid-yawn; some black and brown kids at a rally share a laugh on the side. In one particularly rich image, Pete Wilson, the governor of California, stands at a podium, addressing La Opinión, a Spanish-language newspaper; Antonia Hernández, the head of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, sits to his left, her arms folded, head cocked, trying to destroy him with her glare. “I was surprised someone named Rodriguez was coming from the L.A. Times,” the civil-rights and labor activist Cesar Chavez said when the photographer came to shoot him. Rodriguez ended up taking an iconic picture of Chavez, in the hallway of his office, in front of a campaign banner for the late Robert Kennedy, who had supported Chavez and the farmworkers’ movement.

“In photography,” the scholar and curator Josh Kun writes, in his powerful introductory essay, “double exposure typically refers to the photograph, not the photographer.” It occurs when the film is bared to light twice during a single shot, resulting in two exposures in a single image. The effect can be surreal, like a haunting. Taken as a whole, Rodriguez’s work offers a different kind of double exposure. In dividing his attention between two worlds that overlap but rarely intersect, he created one of the truest chronicles of Los Angeles there is.