View From the Top

When photographer Marvin Rand first laid eyes on the peculiar assemblage of glass, pottery and cement rising from a Watts lot nearly 50 years ago, he was “completely blown away.” Rand, a photography student at the Art Center, had chosen the Watts Towers--27 years into its 34 years in progress--to shoot for a school project. By 1955, Watts Towers creator Simon Rodia’s work was done. Rand’s wasn’t.

Now some of the 2,000 photographs Rand has snapped during a half-century-long series of documentary visits to the Towers are part of an exhibit and newly released book, “The Los Angeles Watts Towers,” published by the Getty Conservation Institute. “Today, it still is as fantastic,” says Rand, now 72. “Look at the details, the way Rodia laid in broken tiles and related one to the other. This was a man without any education, working as a laborer in the tile industry. It was pure intuition.”

It is fortunate for Watts that Simon Rodia passed on the Compton lot he first considered buying in 1921. The diminutive mason and tile maker from Ribottoli, Italy, settled instead on a slender triangle of dusty land at 1765 E. 107th St. With steel mesh, glass shards, pottery fragments, 70,000 seashells and tons of cement--not to mention unending drive and a perennial tan--Rodia created his series of spiraling towers that climb 10 stories into the sky.

“He used to tell me, ‘I come from Italy and I wanted to do something big, big, big,’ ” Rand recalls. “He repeated everything three times.”

The Watts Towers have been undergoing extensive restoration, estimated to be a year from completion, since the late ‘80s. The scaffolding that encircles the site has enabled Rand to reach the rarefied heights only Rodia himself attained. Armed with a Sinare 4-by-5 camera and no fear of vertigo--”I was trained as an aerial photographer in the Air Force”--Rand has captured one-of-a-kind details of Rodia’s work, made of junk scraps he collected either from neighbors or long walks with a knapsack along the train tracks. There are the broken Batchelder tiles, circa 1915, imprinted with Viking ships; the Malibu tiles, circa 1928, glazed with decorative pine cones; brightly hued chunks of Bauer dishes and Vernonware; the subtle shades of Art Nouveau Roseville vases; the thousands of shards of translucent green glass from 7 UP bottles and the cobalt blue of Milk of Magnesia containers. “I was seeing so much more,” Rand says. “Every foot or so it was changing.”

Even when the restoration is done, Rand figures he’ll “always document it. I’ll still be involved emotionally. It’s work--physical and emotional. But the end result is rewarding. It’s an international piece of art, and it’s got to be highly respected and cared for.” Rodia, disillusioned with the neighborhood and his work, abandoned them both in 1955 and moved to Martinez, Calif., where he died in July 1965, one month before fires and riots made Watts better known for something else. (Neighbors rallied to the Towers’ defense, and they survived largely unscathed.) “He always said he would leave his mark in the world,” Rand recalls. “But he didn’t understand what that mark was.”

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“Marvin Rand: Watts Towers,” is on view through Nov. 22 at the Craig Krull Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Building B3, Santa Monica.