Seeing Past the Cliches of Sunshine

“Looking for Los Angeles”--a new volume of essays and documentary photographs in the Getty Research Institute’s “Issues & Debates” series--begins conventionally enough, by looking down on L.A. From a window seat at 2,000 feet, his jet banking on approach to LAX, Dutch novelist Cees Nooteboom searches for signs of the city and, as he writes in one of his two essays included in the book, he sees “houses from horizon to horizon, blue shards of swimming pools, plenty of green in cabbage and lettuce tones. But mostly it’s just houses, traversed by arteries that seem massive even from above....”

On one of those arteries, traveling south on Alameda Street from Union Station to the harbor, Robbert Flick in his photo essay sees the city as a jigsaw puzzle of warehouses, junkyards and rail lines. Flick is looking at L.A. from the driver’s seat with a video camera from which he extracts and stitches together a jagged montage of individual frames. His digital drive-by embraces the city’s regime of speed uncritically and even heightens it, as if our common landscape were the random streetscape passing at 35 mph. The houses and dingbat apartment units of working-class residents are there, but they blur into the background of Flick’s panorama.

Seen from the less privileged (and less familiar) perspective of a pedestrian, the viewpoint used by historian Becky Nicolaides, the abstract patterns of Bell Gardens, Compton and Carson resolve into the everyday details of working-class cities where aspirations for a house, a functioning community and access to Southern California’s beautifully indifferent landscape might be realized. Before World War II, Nicolaides argues, in communities like these, blue-collar homeowners, often the builders of their own houses, defined the essential L.A. of the present: square miles of homes clustered in neighborhoods on whose edges retail, industrial and residential uses promiscuously merged.

All these perspectives--high and low--are valid as points of view, but are still incomplete, because seeing the actual L.A. requires the ability to imagine the large parts of the city that have been rendered invisible. “Specters are haunting downtown Los Angeles,” punning historian Philip J. Ethington writes in the angriest of the 11 essays in this collection. He evokes one ghost photographically by laying a watercolor drawing of an erased neighborhood over a recent photo of the corner of Beaudry Avenue and Court Street. In one of the most evocative images of Los Angeles imaginable, the forms of houses shimmer over the summer brown emptiness of the vacant hillside, rows of surviving concrete steps leading up to vanished front doors that won’t ever again open. But even this effort to materialize the lost Los Angeles isn’t enough. You also have to know that the neighborhood at this corner coexisted with one of the city’s first oil fields in 1900, that the neighborhood was razed in the early 1980s for grandiose redevelopment projects that never happened and that this corner is now part of the disastrously mismanaged Belmont Learning Complex (whose empty classrooms, it is feared, are filling with methane gas leaking from the abandoned oil wells under them). Don’t ever say that L.A. doesn’t have a back story.

If you really go looking for Los Angeles--seeing past the cliches of sunshine and noir, as editors Charles G. Salas and Michael S. Roth have, and without the intoxication of speed that mars our vision of the city--you’ll become entangled in the viewpoints assembled here: the beguiled tourist’s, the careful historian’s and the social critic’s. “Looking for Los Angeles” is a thoughtful and often graceful demonstration of why we’re in a second “golden age” of writing about Los Angeles (although the effect is sometimes blunted by academic jargon and the foregrounding of theory). This book is part of the new collective structure of our understanding of the city, made richer because it reaches back into the 19th century and the start of the 20th, when Los Angeles became one of the nation’s most successfully marketed consumer products.

These highly charged and manipulated images of L.A. compose what French geographer Jerome Monnet calls our “vernacular geography”: our internal, fallible maps of the city that we mistakenly consult before the Thomas Guide. Monnet finds our Westside-Eastside tribal geographies to be strikingly incomplete, more holes than common fabric. The uniform urban grid of Los Angeles, which should be seen as a spectacle of democracy, isn’t enough to overcome the palms-surf-freeway-high-rise-mountain peak iconography that is the concealing screen behind which too much of ordinary L.A. remains, Monnet says, “alien, troubling, menacing and cut off from the rest of the city,” without adequate images and landscapes.

Perhaps, as urban historian Dana Cuff suggests, the city’s rapid self-definition makes it difficult to see the fine-grained texture under the surfaces of Los Angeles. Those surfaces are, in Cuff’s apt metaphor, “convulsive” landscapes, always twitching with big ideas about building the next utopia here on the demolished premises of the last one. What’s broken in each convulsion isn’t just ground; it’s relationships. And it’s broken relationships that make too many of us homeless here, even if we have a house. In Ethington’s essay on the “ghost neighborhoods” of Bunker Hill, his photographs and assemblages--thickly composite images of the present and past--offer spectral evidence of relationships between people and places repeatedly demolished.

Better images of Los Angeles, less garish than those on a tourist postcard, might make the city more whole, but on the evidence in “Looking for Los Angeles,” new images won’t be easily made. Anthropologist Susan A. Phillips finds that a camera carried among gang members is a weapon as risky as a cocked pistol shoved in a waistband. Her photos of homeboys and their families in the Pueblos del Rio housing project are desirable and dangerous precisely because her photographs stand apart from the cruel transactions of gang life. When the “Five Duse” Bloods finally accept Phillips’ regard, it’s not to connect. They accept her views of their lives only on their terms and for their ends.

There are alternatives. Architect Harold Zellman and sociologist Roger Friedland report how purist architecture and progressive politics met at the summit of a hill in Brentwood in 1950 to build “the largest modernist residential cooperative ever attempted in America.” Architectural historian Thomas Hines connects the design principles of Frank Lloyd Wright, the eccentric philanthropy of his client Aline Barnsdall and the photography of Edmund Teske to show how faith in the modern organized Teske’s flamboyant life in Los Angeles as an overlay of the erotic and the architectural. These were small triumphs of modernism in L.A. and not very durable. Teske, Hines notes, “more than most contemporary artists, seems to have been the victim of recurring cycles of dark neglect.” The hundred or so houses of the Crestwood co-op development are swamped now by their commonplace neighbors. In 1941, the city’s public housing was optimistic and modernist, too (and some of the best were designed by Wright’s son). Fifty years later, when photographed by Philips, they’re the failed projects waiting demolition as the city shudders into some other definition of utopia.

For the last 100 years, Los Angeles was imagined as the place where anyone could be anything. For the last dozen years, passionate observers such as those gathered in “Looking for Los Angeles” have been looking at Los Angeles far more clearly and with greater appreciation of the human texture beneath the glossy surface. They’ve found a city worth looking into.

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At night the city is overexposed, white light glowing like steel in a furnace. Have you ever thought about the strangeness of that expression, Light is burning? Look, the heat is so great that the tarmac has become liquid. Liquid and a shade of green that does not exist. I see this from the window of my hotel in Hollywood. The person standing next to me says that this comes from the high degree of illusion in the air here: “The dreams of the whole world are invented here.” I do not know whether that is true. I don’t need to know. The cars are buzzing past down there like metal insects, the Pacific air is cool, the field of lights extends to the horizon, undulating and rising with the shape of the hills, swaying far out up to the darkness of the ocean.

--Cees Nooteboom, from “Looking for Los Angeles”

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D.J. Waldie is the author of the essays in “Real City: Downtown Los Angeles Inside/Out.” He lives in Lakewood, where he is a city official.