Category: early b&w

rDay Five-Hundred-Seventy-Eight: Mirror in the Sky, with an Audio Sidetrack

Somewhere between Hollywood and downtown LA, around 6th and Hoover, is a mirror-glass-wrapped skyscraper that I often drove or walked or bicycled by, admiring how it could almost disappear into the sky, depending on lighting conditions*.  The entire building could change color as the sky changed, something a bit difficult to demonstrate with black & white photographs.  Not always a big fan of commercial architecture, but this was a bit different for me, a mirror into the air, perched at an angle near the edge of Lafayette Park and attached at ground level by flowing buttresses or whatever those elements are called.  And I was taken by the way a nearby church — I believe it was the historic  First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, based on notes attached to the negatives — was reflected. Today I came upon some of my forgotten and unprocessed negatives from one of my photographic encounters with the building. April, 1974. Rated G.

*(Unfortunately, I don’t have examples here of how the building would reflect the sky and its clouds and changing colors, but I must have something like that somewhere, as I definitely photographed the thing from time to time.  For that matter, I know that I have photographed the church as well, as it abounds with history and art.  And I think that it is the church famed for its gigantic pipe organ, which I have heard in performance, years ago.  Any viewers who can chime in on this, feel free.)

UPDATE:  A little research discloses that this building was erected in 1972, has twenty floors, and was called the CNA Park Place Tower (CNA is the insurance and financial services company) and apparently now is the building of the Los Angeles Superior Court.  

UPDATE #2:  Holy cow.  Just discovered that YouTube has a series of videos on the “Great Organs of First Church”, starting with this one:

Sierra Nevada – May 1974

Another Land Rover photographic trek into the Sierra Nevada mountain area of Northern California.  Most of these pics are from the area north of Death Valley and south of Yosemite, if I recall, and take in the California border ghost town at Bodie, and include a bit of late day and early evening Mono Lake (with its salt formations arising from unusual drainage conditions) and other nearby wanderings.

A Little More SPARC

Just a follow-on to my recent mention of SPARC.  Knowing that I had worked with SPARC intermittently through the 70s and 80s, I made a quick search of the 10,846 negatives so far (as of yesterday) uncovered for the 1974-1999 period to look for likely relevant keyword matches. Less than half of those have any keywords at all, but I did locate a few SPARC-related items after a few minutes to supplement that previous post.

Here, we see some images of a couple of artists I worked closely with, a few research photos of potential public art sites on freeway walls (an ongoing quest was to find and negotiate for public art spaces around LA), and other miscellany. I probably have some more stuff from the SPARC period on my photoblog (that may not be of general interest, however).

Mostly Venice, 1974 – SPARC

Whew! I could just about write a book about this photo and the memories it triggers.
1974-06-11-12-edit
This is the old Venice City Police Station and Jail, located at — I won’t forget this address — 685 Venice Boulevard. I don’t recall the first time I ever saw it, but by the time I had taken this photo it had been vacated by the City of Los Angeles, and was mostly being, and continued to be, rented out for film productions (it even shows up in the Woody Allen movie, Annie Hall). Here as the “Dull City Jail” it was apparently decked out with temporary, fictitious signage for one such instance.

A couple of years after I made the above photo, the place was acquired by three artists and filmmakers (Judy, Donna and Christina) who founded SPARC in that place.
christina-judy-donna_annotated

 SPARC — the Social and Public Art Resource Center — was soon to become my workplace, even my live-in studio residence for a time, and would be the venue for some utterly remarkable adventures and acquaintances (not the least of whom were the co-founders, particularly the amazing Judy Baca with whom I worked closely and often as her administrative “right-hand man” and advisor) over a good number of years. Don’t even ask, don’t get me started on stories of feminist politics, art world machinations, city government escapades, legal and extra-legal exploits, art projects undertaken against all odds and much, much more that arose from those experiences.

Here’s a link to SPARC’s website. And here’s a February 2016 Google Street View image of the SPARC site.

sparc_google-street-view_feb2016

And, finally, the SPARC building as shown in “Annie Hall”:
woody-allen_venice-jail

More Venice