Author: leh

Photogrammar

Photogrammar is a Yale online project site for organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI).  I quickly discovered about 100 photographs of Monona County, Iowa — where I spent most of my childhood — on the site, made by later-renowned photographers Russell Lee (famously documented Japanese-American internment during WWII) and John Vachon (noted for his photos of Marilyn Monroe, among others).  The Monona County photographs are dated about one year prior to my birth.  Here are a few examples.

I also came upon hundreds and hundreds of FSA photographs from eastern Oregon made by legendary photographer Dorothea Lange, like this:
dorothea_lange_8b35081v

Thanks to photographer friend, John, for alerting me to Photogrammar.

Point Vicente, 1975

Point Vicente is on some of the most rugged and interesting of Los Angeles-area beaches, between the “tourist” beach cities of Manhattan, Hermosa and Redondo and Los Angeles Harbor/Long Beach.  Its lighthouse stood on the tip of the Palos Verdes peninsula overlooking the seafront where these photographs were made in March of 1975.  This is a place where metal blends into rock.

Ongoing Demise of the Los Angeles Times

As a 30-year veteran of Los Angeles living, I came to be a regular and loyal reader of the Times (and did some consulting work for a few weeks at its Times-Mirror parent).  Today, brother Dennis (not only a Los Angeles resident, but a newspaper reporter in his immediate post-college days) sends me an email with the subject line that I have quoted in this post’s title), along with this content:

“​Oct. 5 issue, presented without comment.”
L.A. Times

rDay One-Hundred-Ninety-Five

Today, driving around town on errands and shopping …

* Why an interest in Airstream?  Probably because this was similar to one I had in mind in the mid-70s — the idea was to equip it as a mobile photographic lab and operations base, towed by my killer ’65 Ford truck (which co-existed with the Land Rover for a time and also figured in the Venice years).  Here’s a 1977 portrait of The Truck, a sleeper hot rod.
1977 Misc-0009-Edit-Edit

Venice – Dogtown Postscript

I’ve been (surprisingly) getting a fair amount of feedback on my old Venice image resurrections.  Some is from old friend and ex-UCLA-colleague, John, who tells me that he was coming of age then in the Dogtown (aka Venice) skateboarding culture era.   Along with many fascinating details of the sport, the music of the time, Venice itself and his own youth as a skateboarder, he reminds me of the 2001 documentary, narrated by Sean Penn, of the skateboarding scene in Venice in the 1970s.  Here’s the trailer (and I will try to see if it can be viewed online in its entirety somewhere — perhaps YouTube):