My photographic sidekick Bill and his partner capturing the surf with his ancient 8×10 view camera …
Tag: venice
Brandelli’s Brig
Stumbled upon this one from circa 1977 Venice. With a little memory-jogging help from brother Dennis and a current Google Street View image, we can compare this old West Washington Blvd (now Abbott-Kinney Blvd.) watering hole with its locally famous self-referencing mural, then …
… and now.
This place was within walking distance of my place on Westminster & Speedway, and just up the street from the old Chelsea Gallery, which I once managed. No, there was no valet parking in those days. And I recall encountering John Doe and Exene, pre-X, there once.
Summer 1975: Bicycles and Gabrielle
Memorable from that period were some of bicycle treks — shown here are two photos of an early morning departure for a run from Venice to Laguna Beach (60 miles each way) with Dennis and Mike (aka Rojo) and a couple of scenes from the sojourn from Venice to Solvang (about 125 miles each way), where I experienced the most excruciating relentless uphill stretches ever in the mountains out of Santa Barbara. (Even bicycle racer/mechanic “iron man” Dennis suffered a blister or two.) And the best memory highlighting that summer was a visit of a few weeks by niece Gabrielle, all the way from New York City. (The white-haired gentleman, whose name I forget, was her maternal grandfather.)
Humans, 1975
More never-before-seen resurrections from the archives.
Friends, acquaintances and neighbors in and around Venice …
Rich and Dennis on a chilly early morning …
Venice, Now
In contrast to the Venice in some of my previous posts of resurrected B&W negatives (like here and here and elsewhere), brother Dennis — who lives between Venice and the 405 Freeway — sends this bit of news.
Venice: Dogs and Bellbottoms, 1975
Today, more from the B&W negative archives. Venice, as you may recall, was once known as “Dogtown”. 
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):
Venice Beach, Part III
Another random discovery …
And here we meet Victor, from early 1975. He and his dog lived in an old circa 1952 Pontiac and a decrepit immobile old delivery van on the vacant lot next to the beachfront apartment where I stayed at the time. Some say that he had a PhD and once had a career as an engineer. Sometimes Victor was quite lucid, sometimes not at all. He saw himself as king of the lot and sometimes tried to extract fees from people who parked there. He seemed to survive on that as well as odd jobs (I paid him once to help me out with a fix to something on the Landrover, which is pictured here with Victor and a neighbor.) We were all quite astonished one day when, according to some neighborhood eyewitnesses, a well-dressed woman appeared in a Mercedes, claiming to be his wife, and took him away with her. As I recall, he reappeared not long after.
Venice Beach, Forty Years Ago
I didn’t know her at the time, but my later-to-be friend, Ann Nietzke, was living almost next door to me when she wrote her “Windowlight” book about her life in the neighborhood. The flavor of the place, and her observations and musings, came back to me as I stumbled upon a few more photographs from that time …
Incidentally, if you want to get a taste of the transformation of Venice Beach in recent years, visit the website of the contemporary Cadillac Hotel.
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.
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.