Looking Backward : Former Life photographer Horace Bristol wants to chronicle with pictures his sentimental story of the Ventura Freeway.

In 1938 Horace Bristol’s haunting photographs of California’s migrant laborers inspired his collaborator, John Steinbeck, to write “The Grapes of Wrath.”

Bristol’s “Rescue at Rabaul,” which portrays a naked gunner after a daring sea rescue of a downed Marine, is one of the better-known photographs from World War II.

Bristol, during 25 years in Asia, recorded Cambodian Prince Sihanouk’s coronation. And, among other things, the former Life magazine photographer chronicled the exile of Chiang Kai-shek and his army to Taiwan.

It all sounds very exotic.

But after two attempts at retirement, in Japan and Mexico, the 83-year-old Ojai resident has begun a project closer to home--literally and figuratively. Bristol is photographing the Ventura Freeway.

Why would a veteran of the Golden Age of Photojournalism--a colleague and friend of Margaret Bourke-White, Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange--bother with a freeway?

“I’m trying to tell the story of how this Highway 101 is intertwined with my life,” he said, reviewing 5-by-6-inch color photographs carefully mounted on the pages of a notebook titled “Route 101: A Sentimental Journey.”

He recalled his boyhood in Santa Paula, where his maternal grandfather published and edited the Santa Paula Chronicle. “And my paternal grandfather had a ranch in the San Fernando Valley--1913 is the first time I remember going with him to get water by wagon,” Bristol said. “Now the ranch, in Woodland Hills, is covered with houses. And the place we got the water is covered by the Warner Center.”

He continued: “Driving my kids to college at Stanford University and visiting them at UCSB is the most sentimental part of the road for me--and also the most recent memory.”

But his work is more than a family album. He called it “designs in color,” wryly noting: “I’m interested in patterns, not in picture postcards.”

His shots of the Ventura Mission, sea and sand at Point Mugu, and hammerhead oil derricks along the Rincon underscore his comments. And some of the images are quite geometric, capturing, for example, the pattern formed by light on the furrowed rows of an agricultural field.

Bristol said he is interested in showing how much the area has changed over the decades. Noting the reflective plastic sheeting in a strawberry field, he said: “We didn’t have this back then.”

The project is motivated by Bristol’s desire to bring closure to a career that began with a photo essay on the oil refineries in California. And he is eager to work with Henri, the youngest of his four children, now studying at USC’s School of Cinematography.

Henri was born when Bristol was 60 years old. And it was Henri’s enthusiasm for Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” while attending Nordhoff High School in Ojai, that rekindled his father’s interest in his own work.

“I was angry with myself because I realized I had not shared my work with my children,” Bristol recalled.

For more than 50 years, Bristol’s images have eloquently reflected the story of Americans at work and at war. Until five years ago, however, his family had not seen them.

The photographs, some of which had made Bristol famous as a member of Edward Steichen’s unique naval aviation photographic unit, had been stored away since 1956 in Japan. It was there that a despondent Bristol burned many negatives after his wife of 27 years committed suicide. Today Bristol credits his second wife, Masako, and her mother for rescuing the remaining work.