Students Get the Picture : A ‘New Generation’ takes a Fresh Look at L.A. landmarks--and they’re anything but traditional.

One thing struck Abbey Fuchs, 18, as she viewed the collection of photographs included in “Picture L.A.: Landmarks of a New Generation,” an exhibition of photographs by Los Angeles youths, ages 10-18, at Los Angeles City Hall’s Bridge Gallery.

“There are no pictures of the Hollywood sign--probably the most famous landmark in Los Angeles,” observed Fuchs, a freshman communications major at Sonoma State University who grew up in Los Angeles and attended Fairfax High.

Fuchs was among eight area students chosen to shoot photographs for “Picture L.A.,” organized by the Getty Conservation Institute. The photographs, plus essays, have also been put together in a book with the same title by Getty Trust Publications, available in area bookstores.

A landmark, Fuchs said, is “really anything that you want it to be. It’s not about somebody saying: ‘This is a landmark, you should go take pictures of it because it was built by someone’s great-grandfather.’

“I hope adults realize that children are people under the age of 21, who do have their own sense of what is happening to them,” Fuchs added. “And I hope people will stop and take a look at everything around them, rather than driving by it.”

*

The sites chosen by the young photographers--who were sent out with point-and-shoot cameras loaded with black-and-white film--were anything but traditional. Hardly an assortment of stony edifices, monuments and plaques, their “landmarks” included such moving targets as basketball players, homeless camps, Venice roller skaters and lots of cars--from a simple shot of a glistening bumper or commuters on the freeway to a trash-filled hulk in graffiti-plastered Belmont tunnel and an eerie burned-out Jeep in Las Flores Canyon after 1993’s Malibu fire.

Getty Conservation Institute director Miguel Angel Corzo said that the institute had undertaken a traditional study of Los Angeles area landmarks but that “I had read the reports and had sat in on the meetings, but I felt we were getting answers we already knew,” he said.

“I thought, ‘Los Angeles has different landmarks than, say, Boston--the history is very different.’ I was trying to figure out how we could really get a lay person’s voice and which were the most important voices--and I felt they were really the young people,” Corzo added.

Corzo enlisted photographer Lauren Greenfield, 28, who grew up in Venice and attended Santa Monica’s Crossroads School, to select a group of young people to take a fresh view of their surroundings (Greenfield is working on her own book on growing up in Los Angeles). Through schools, arts organizations and community groups, she selected students representing diverse communities including South-Central, Hollywood, Koreatown, Boyle Heights, Watts and Inglewood.

Shooting took place from October, 1993, through the beginning of January; then the photographers were sent out again to document the new “landmarks” created by the Jan. 17 earthquake.

Daniel Hernandez, 11, a Boyle Heights sixth-grader, was fascinated by the Chateau Marmont Hotel; during a group field trip there, he photographed a Sunset Boulevard billboard featuring two people locked in a passionate kiss, half-hidden by lush foliage. “I liked it because it made a scene like only the movies capture,” he said.

Hernandez also asked Greenfield to take him to Malibu after the 1993 fires. “I felt sorry for the people,” he said. “The first place that we went to, there was a lady standing there, looking at her house--it was all burnt down, nothing left. She was standing there, looking down, and I took her picture. Also there we saw this little kid, riding on a (toy) tractor, all happy because he didn’t have to go to school.”

Raul Herrera, now a 19-year-old photography major at Los Angeles City College, focused on a homeless community in Belmont Tunnel. “I mostly took pictures of the homeless because we have to do something about the homeless,” he said. “Not just take care of them but guide them in a certain way so they can get out of the streets again.”

Herrera also wanted to highlight the urban beauty of the tunnel. “There are two types of graffiti. What they do on the buses is vandalism; what they do in the tunnel is art ,” he said. “Even the homeless tell me without the graffiti, life would be a little more boring.”

Osofu Washington of Inglewood, 17, a Crenshaw High student, chose back-yard basketball games and a local barbershop as his landmarks. “Before the project, I thought a landmark was something that you wrote on the ground, like ‘Jim was here’--something that you made ,” he said, laughing. “This gave me a whole different perspective.

“A lot of people think of (my neighborhood) as the inner city, a real bad place to be,” Washington continued. “Maybe this will give them a sense of what’s positive about the neighborhood. And people who are already here might see something across the street and say, ‘Hey, that’s a landmark!’--and get a sense of pride.”

* “Picture L.A.,” Dec. 7-Jan. 7, Henry P. Rio Bridge Gallery, Los Angeles City Hall, 200 N. Spring St. 8-5:30 p.m. Monday-Friday; 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday. (310) 822-2299.