Woodland Hills Photographer’s Art Reflects a Lifetime of Changes

“I suppose that the hook for this story is that I’m old,” Liz Whitty said at the end of an interview.

Whitty, a fine arts photographer whose work can be seen this month at the Pierce College Art Gallery, didn’t take her first photo class until after she retired. But although she is almost 75, her story has less to do with age than with adjustments.

As a young woman, Whitty, who grew up in Los Angeles and thrived in the lively political community at UCLA in the late 1930s, always thought she’d make her home in Southern California. But when her first husband, Richard Rycoff, decided to attend Harvard, she followed him to Cambridge, Mass.

During her stay in Massachusetts, Whitty became involved in a child-care program for working mothers. Her work was noticed by the Roosevelt Administration and she was asked to create a national program similar to the one she worked on in Cambridge.

But just as she was about to become a member of the Roosevelt team, her husband joined a Naval intelligence unit and had to move to Boulder, Colo., to learn Japanese.

After the move to Colorado, Whitty enrolled in an accelerated aeronautical engineering program at the University of Colorado, which trained her to become one of the few women engineers of that era.

When her husband was transferred to New York, she followed. And when he went off to war, she went to work for what was then Republic Aviation (now Fairchild Industries), the company that made World War II’s P-47 fighter planes. Her proudest accomplishment there was the redesign of the P-47’s tail section.

After the war, Whitty and her husband moved to Southern California, where she briefly worked for a company that distributed documentaries. Then, like most women of her generation, she quit work to start a family. But when her two daughters were 10 and 11 years old, she and her husband divorced.

She would have gone back to engineering, but the computer age had arrived and she had no computer training. “When I was an engineer,” Whitty says, “I was my own computer.”

She adjusted again and became a fifth-grade teacher at what was, in 1966, a brand-new school in Chatsworth called Germain Street Elementary. In 1979, Whitty retired from teaching.

But that’s only the beginning of the story.

First came love. She remarried, “and this time,” she says, “he came out from back East and fit into my life style.”

Then, during a trip she made to South Carolina for a convention her husband Joe was attending, she discovered yet another career. While her husband attended meetings, she prowled around the small tobacco-growing town and began to take photographs. Eventually, he had a mini-photo documentary on the town, and she was hooked on photography.

When Whitty returned to California, she enrolled in the photography program at Pierce College where she went on to win several awards. Since completing her training, she has traveled all over the world taking photos.

Her first show, in 1983, was an in-depth study of the tiny Mississippi town where her mother grew up. “It was a way of finding out about a part of my heritage that I knew so little about,” she said.

Another major adjustment in Whitty’s life came a few years ago when her second husband died “after 5 1/2 wonderful years of marriage.” Today she lives with a dog named Travis in Woodland Hills. Her home is filled with piles of mounted photographs and she spends much of her time in the darkroom she made in an old bedroom that used to belong to one of her daughters.

But she is on the road a great deal, too. She recently traveled to the Soviet Union, Ireland, Morocco, Spain and through the American Southwest. Photos from these trips make up the exhibit at Pierce College.

“It’s strange how I’ve been able to use things from my past in my photography,” Whitty said. “Through engineering, for instance, I picked up a love of graphics and the ability to pay attention to details--I learned to think perceptively.”

And she learned to adjust. These days, however, the only adjustments she worries about concern f-stops and shutter speeds. She likes it that way.

The exhibit “Liz Whitty: A Photographic Journal, 1979-1989” will be at the Pierce College Art Gallery at 6201 Winnetka Ave., Woodland Hills, from Jan. 11-31. There will be an opening reception Wednesday from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m. For information, call (818) 347- 0551.