Skip to main content

What Do We See When We Look At L.A. Again?

Support Provided By

I've finished a project for the city I used to work for. It's a selection of photographs for publication by a company that produces local history books composed mostly of old photographs. I sent the city's project -- 186 photos -- to the editor today.Although the city has a sizable collection of images that might be called historic, many of the photographs are much the same -- aerials of the unbuilt landscape that would be built on and more aerials of the building itself. Down on the ground, the photographs are mostly culled from newspapers or advertising campaigns. Those photographs present the past as all surface.

I also completed a project with old photographs for the Getty's survey of Los Angeles architecture called Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940 -1990. I'd been asked, along with several others, to sort though the Huntington Library's collection of photographs donated by Southern California Edison and to assemble some for an online gallery.

The Edison collection -- stretching from the end of the 19th century into the 1970s -- contains a lot: advertising, construction records, shots of working men and women, examples of exterior and interior lighting projects, tests of equipment, and celebratory images of industrial progress.

I chose to tell a story with the photographs that I pulled from the Edison collection, stringing 35 of them together into a nasty, pseudo-noir account of murder, illicit romance, and existential boredom. It was surprisingly easy. Black-and-white photographs of Los Angeles streets and houses in the 1940s, a few ad shots, an accident scene, an Edison employee with an odd expression and you get dread.

Or 186 black-and-white photographs from the 1940s through the 1970s of my town and you get nostalgia at worst.

Some of those photographs were taken by the noted aerial photographer William A. Garnett. His photographs of the building of my town are spectacular but he chose, I was told by a researcher who had met with him, not to keep much of that early work.

There are just a few images -- the abstract and slightly hallucinatory ones -- which he kept. The few Garnett aerials the city has were randomly saved in a file folder somewhere, kept because they recorded some facts on the ground that someone wanted to remember (although even these facts are in beautiful images).

The book of old photographs I put together for the city tries to tell a story -- not the one Garnett ruthlessly edited his work to tell; not the joking manipulation of the everyday into something sinister that I made out of Edison's blandly industrial photographs. We're schooled in how to look at old photographs to see mostly their surreal qualities.

Do the six or so aerial photographs that Garnett saved tell the story of building my town? Do the few more saved from the city's files tell a different story or a better one? Do the 186 old photographs I assembled for publication tell a truer story or only another one?

D. J. Waldie, author and historian, writes about Los Angeles twice each week at KCET's SoCal Focus blog.

Support Provided By
Read More
Gray industrial towers and stacks rise up from behind the pitched roofs of warehouse buildings against a gray-blue sky, with a row of yellow-gold barrels with black lids lined up in the foreground to the right of a portable toilet.

California Isn't on Track To Meet Its Climate Change Mandates. It's Not Even Close.

According to the annual California Green Innovation Index released by Next 10 last week, California is off track from meeting its climate goals for the year 2030, as well as reaching carbon neutrality by 2045.
A row of cows stands in individual cages along a line of light-colored enclosures, placed along a dirt path under a blue sky dotted with white puffy clouds.

A Battle Is Underway Over California’s Lucrative Dairy Biogas Market

California is considering changes to a program that has incentivized dairy biogas, to transform methane emissions into a source of natural gas. Neighbors are pushing for an end to the subsidies because of its impact on air quality and possible water pollution.
A Black woman with long, black brains wears a black Chicago Bulls windbreaker jacket with red and white stripes as she stands at the top of a short staircase in a housing complex and rests her left hand on the metal railing. She smiles slightly while looking directly at the camera.

Los Angeles County Is Testing AI's Ability To Prevent Homelessness

In order to prevent people from becoming homeless before it happens, Los Angeles County officials are using artificial intelligence (AI) technology to predict who in the county is most likely to lose their housing. They would then step in to help those people with their rent, utility bills, car payments and more so they don't become unhoused.