Camera Provides New Focus for Former D.A.

The roof on which Gil Garcetti stood was sloping crazily, like some asphalt-coated Tilt-a-Whirl. It veered up here, swirled down there. A plumb line, hung from the edge, would have served mainly to demonstrate the sheer, leering un-plumbness of Disney Hall.

Garcetti, former district attorney of Los Angeles County, was near the northeastern cornice of the soon-to-be concert hall, lots of sky above and below him. If he had turned his head just 30 degrees or so, he would have had a fine view, framed by iron girders, of his old office in the downtown Criminal Courts Building. If he had slipped, well....

He kept his footing and looked straight ahead at two ironworkers on “the float,” a sheet of plywood that hung in space beneath a girder they were welding. He raised a little Leica camera.

The shutter was too quiet to make an audible click.

For six months now, Disney Hall has been Garcetti’s workplace. The former prosecutor, defeated by current Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley in November 2000, has turned to the unlawyerly pursuit of photography to record the construction of a building that appears destined to become a landmark.

Garcetti’s focus has been the ironworkers who have nearly finished their portion of the job, raising the steel-clad skeleton that will give Disney Hall its eccentric, billowing shape.

With the cooperation of their union, Ironworkers Local 433, he plans to publish a book of his photographs sometime in the fall, a year before the hall’s opening. Proceeds will go to the union’s choice of charities.

It might seem an unusual career move for an ex-prosecutor, someone best known for his dapper television appearances in a losing cause, the trial of O.J. Simpson. But Garcetti seems to be having the time of his life, bounding about the rebar and chatting up tattooed construction workers who have come to accept him as an ally, if not quite one of their own.

When ironworker Sue Egberts first saw him, she said, “I was kind of surprised. I didn’t know this was an interest of his.” She demanded that he remove his sunglasses so she could confirm that this Gil, the one everybody was talking about, was indeed that Gil, the former D.A.

He was. In time, she said, she came to admire him.

“You know, he’s put a lot of energy into this,” she said. “You see him almost every day--at least once or twice a week--just taking the time to document what we do.”

Garcetti, 60, has been a serious amateur photographer for 32 years, since the birth of his daughter, Dana, who is now a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney. He shoots and develops in black and white, as might be expected from someone who has spent his life in the noir world of Los Angeles criminal justice.

The book, his first, will be published by Balcony Press of Glendale, which specializes in art and architecture. Its working title is “Iron: Erecting Walt Disney Concert Hall.” Frank Gehry, the architect of Disney Hall, has agreed to contribute the forward, Garcetti said.

None of this is what Garcetti expected to be doing after he lost a bitter race against Cooley, one of his top deputies.

Immediately after the loss, he said, he threw himself into another campaign, that of his son, Eric, for Los Angeles City Council. Eric Garcetti won in June, leaving his father at loose ends.

The elder Garcetti decided to spend the next six months doing whatever he wanted. There was just one hitch: “I didn’t know what that was,” he said.

“I had said no to law firms,” he added. “That’s not what I wanted to do. I’d practiced law for 32 years. They wanted me in three capacities: Either as a ‘rainmaker,’ someone who brings money and clients in; two, their government relations person on a local, state and national level; or three, be their trial lawyer.... And I said, you know, I don’t think that’s really what I want to do with the rest of my life.”

Then, one day in July, he was driving home from a meeting downtown when he saw an ironworker crawling along an arched beam high atop the rising superstructure of Disney Hall.

Garcetti usually keeps a camera in his car, and he reached for it. It wasn’t there. He drove on, but the image of the ironworker stuck with him.

“I came back the next day with my cameras,” he recalled. “I was across the street.... And I started taking photographs of them, and it was just neat. I had this one guy who crawled off the ‘zoom boom,’ as they call it, which takes them up high, and he was a bolter-upper; once the beam has been put in place and just connected, it’s his job to bolt it up together.

“And so I saw him crawl off and balance himself on this arched beam. His footings were on a small piece of steel on the outside, and I mean, I was just amazed at his balancing act--the acrobatics of it all.”

Garcetti was hooked. Not long after, he called the ironworkers union to ask if he could get onto the construction site.

“The business agent got on the phone and said, ‘Gil, we’ll send you a thousand dollars.’ And I laughed and said, ‘I’m not running for anything.’ And he said, ‘Oh, I thought that’s why you were calling.’”

After that was straightened out, Garcetti received the permission he wanted in exchange for a promise to shoot a picture for an ironworkers publication. Before long, he was making near-daily treks from his Brentwood home to Disney Hall.

Ironworkers are famously proud and notoriously prickly. Garcetti has worked hard to fit in.

“At first, it was like, being a district attorney, what’s he doing out here?” recalled Brent Allen May, the union steward on the project. But the workers warmed to Garcetti after he began giving them photos of themselves.

“No one appreciates what we do, usually,” May said.

There were jokes, of course. When Garcetti interviewed photographic subjects, ironworkers would say he was “taking a confession.” His interviewees became sure targets for ribbing. “You have no idea,” lamented one worker, Mitch Shanholtzer.

Sept. 11 helped break the ice. The ironworkers see a close link between themselves and their New York counterparts who have worked on the cleanup of the World Trade Center, and early plans called for proceeds from the book to go to Trade Center charities. Now that those charities are sufficiently funded, most of the proceeds will probably go to other needy organizations.

With the project almost done, Garcetti has begun to think about his future. He doesn’t know what he’ll do, although he said he retains a “passion for public policy” and doesn’t rule out another run for office. Then again, he doesn’t rule out another photo project either.

He got some career advice from an ironworker recently.

“They gonna make an ironworker outta you?” the man yelled.

“Yes, sir!” Garcetti replied.

“If they get you hanging out there,” the man said, pointing to the highest beams, “you’ll wish they’d made you a pipe fitter instead.”