Day: September 29, 2015

Santa Monica Cat Show, 1975

In February 1975, I was invited by a cat lover to a competitive judging of … cats.  I was eager to penetrate this alien subculture, but never processed any of the negatives for some reason.  Until now, just running into these long-forgotten documents of an amazing and rather bizarre experience.   One of those situations where people are eager to have you photograph them in their element …

I know that I took many more photos that day, but I won’t track them down now; this should give you some sense of the thing.  

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Some of today’s slightly unusual events included:

  • a rare sighting of a train coming down Island Avenue;
  • an accidental photograph (while grappling a shopping bag) of the friendly Walmart guy;
  • inspecting an old for-sale Passat;
  • spotting a pretty rare (perhaps for good reason) and probably over ten years old supercharged C230 4-banger Merc in traffic;
  • engaging the services of the Busy Bee furnace guy for an entire afternoon of cleaning the furnace ductwork in anticipation of winter

Exciting stuff, no?

Venice, Circa 1975

In my on-again, off-again project to scan and digitize at least some of the >80,000 black & white 35mm negatives from years past in basement storage, I returned to find something that I recalled, triggered by my recent moon and stars image.  It is this photo, taken of a dirty and broken window in my beachfront neighborhood of Venice, that for me then (and perhaps now) evoked a view of the cosmos.
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Venice was a gritty, roughshod place that suited my gritty, grainy, contrasty style of photographing at the time.  I quickly assembled a few more — all previously unpublished — that fell to hand to display below (I suspect that I have hundreds and maybe thousands of Venice images from this era), led off by a street scene near the beach and boardwalk in pre-gentrification, or early stages thereof, times.

Oh, yeah.  Come to think of it, this was where I was living when I met the love of my life — but she moved me out soon thereafter and eventually we found ourselves in Oregon.  And so on and so on.