Some images I believe are from Santa Monica and West LA …
Category: early b&w
Mostly Venice, 1974
Guess it shouldn’t be surprising that I keep running into old photos from my years in Venice. I lived there for quite a few years in a couple of stretches, as well as nearby Santa Monica and elsewhere in westside LA. Here I unearth for the first time a bunch of negatives from a box marked “mostly Venice”. (also see previous posts about Venice)
Trip to Yosemite, 1974
Documenting parts of a trip up the coast then over to Yosemite National Park. From previously undiscovered, unprocessed negatives.
Utah, September 1974
Some Utah in general. Probably not the definitive photographic portrait of the state.
‘Roving in Utah – September 1974
I knew it was wrong for me to be in Utah, where I was clearly an outsider — after all, my vehicle was a pure British RHD (right hand drive) model … And I know that some people talk of their horses the way that I may have of my Land Rover.
More 1974 South Dakota: Pine Ridge and Wounded Knee
In the run-up to my 1973-74 assignment to study the White Mountain Apache tribe and reservation, I read — among much else by way of research — Dee Brown’s shocking and controversial book, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee”. (Read it, if you haven’t already.) Wounded Knee was also the site of a prolonged and violent protest occupation and takeover by AIM (American Indian Movement) Sioux members during my Arizona Apache stint, making big news throughout Native American communities and nationally as well. A film was also made on the subject later on. More
After I hit the road in late 1974, I decided to make a point of seeing the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Although I spent very little time there, expecting to give it more time on my return leg (never happened, unfortunately), I did grab some images of the mostly empty landscape as an adjunct to my sojourn through the Badlands.
The Badlands, 1974
Second only to Death Valley, a favorite photographic venue has to be the Badlands of South Dakota. In the early fall of 1974, during a major Land Rover expedition, I drove across the Badlands (and the nearby Black Hills).
In A Kansas Cemetery, 1974
In September 1974, I was slowly wending my way on a solo cross-country road trip with my faithful Land Rover, purposely avoiding interstate highways so as to discover off-the-beaten track photographic opportunities and lessen the frustration of driving a vehicle that maxxed out at 60 mph. Stopping to see old acquaintances in cities like Denver and Kansas City and Omaha, it was a childhood friend settled in small-town Kansas who told me about the Davis Memorial in a cemetery outside nearby Hiawatha, a village of about two or three thousand residents.
After the death of his wife, Sarah, in the 1930s a wealthy farmer named John Milburn Davis commissioned an Italian marble tomb in her memory, taking several years and something like $100,000-200,000 of his Depression-era fortune to complete. Ten or twelve statues of the couple depict different stages of their lives, with the final representing Davis seated beside “The Vacant Chair” after her passing. Following are some of the photographs from that session (strictly speaking, not all of these images are newly-(re)discovered, as I did publish two in an art journal in the mid-seventies and one was included in a Los Angeles gallery exhibit). Following that are some links and videos with more information on this strange and haunting edifice.
And some found information, just tonight unearthed from the Internet …
President Ford Pardons Nixon
September 8, 1974
… With little discernible effect on Long Beach, California …
… or my Land Rover.
Who knew then that politics would reach their present depths?
[The above are photographs taken on September 8, 1974. This begins a project to seek out images unwittingly made on days of particular historical interest.]
Iowa – Fall 1974: Gingles Farm, More
Today I find a few more from this years-past Iowa stopover …
