Students see L.A. from the ground up
- Share via
Photographers Ima Kurada and William Christenberry keep their cameras ready as they roam a North Hollywood sidewalk beneath a bright orange rooftop sign announcing “Miss Peaches.com SOUL FOOD.”
Kurada is a diminutive 26-year-old photography student from Japan with green streaks in her short black hair who is becoming entranced with the shade of sky-blue paint on the stucco facade of a store.
Her tutor is Christenberry, 70, a tall, soft-spoken man who helped pioneer the use of color in fine arts photography. He is an Alabama-born artist based in Washington, D.C., renowned for his photos, paintings and sculptures of rural Southern churches, sheds and sign-laden country stores.
They have come together Saturday on Lankershim Boulevard with nine other college students as part of a project by the Getty Museum to pair artists with students learning to record their neighborhoods.
Forty college students were divided up between four nationally known photographers and sent out to East Los Angeles, the Santa Clarita and San Fernando valleys and Venice.
The goal of the project was to capture “where we live,” a term borrowed from the new Getty photography exhibition of the same name.
Christenberry and the students from L.A. Valley College who followed him to North Hollywood and Van Nuys would find sidewalks alive with the kaleidoscope-hued facades and signs of African American, Armenian, Latino and Caribbean businesses. The scene became a classroom for both student and teacher.
“It’s vibrant. Exciting. It’s my cup of tea,” says Christenberry before he points his camera toward the SOUL FOOD sign.
Two doors down, Kurada keeps Christenberry’s lessons in mind as she studies the exterior of a hair salon specializing in black hair care, its faded sign reading “Crown Glory” with a little crown between the two words.
Kurada said she learned from Christenberry that she could take straightforward photographs of simple themes and colors, a technique new to her.
And the project taught her to view Los Angeles and its familiar scenes in a different way. “I realized it could be like art,” she says.
She points her lens toward the blue facade. In a single frame, she captures a part of Los Angeles: the salon sign, the scarlet bougainvillea blooming on the fence next door, the blue facade painted with fresco-like clouds, and above it all, a cloud-dotted blue California sky.
“Sky blue, and this blue,” Kurada remarks.
The Getty recruited Christenberry and the three other prominent artists with works in the exhibit -- Karen Halverson, Camilo Jose Vergara and Alex Harris -- to act as mentors for students from four Los Angeles County community colleges.
The four photographers toured the exhibit, “Where We Live: Photographs of America From the Berman Collection,” with the students Friday and crisscrossed the county Saturday. On Sunday, the entire group met at the museum.
Students were advised to learn from the experts’ work and their ideas about how to create photos of their surroundings.
The project pulled together students from many corners of Los Angeles with different backgrounds and styles.
Two years after arriving in Los Angeles from Japan, Kurada still has to stop to think when someone asks her where she lives. She first settled in Northridge. She now lives in Echo Park, near downtown, but commutes to Valley College in Valley Glen to study photography.
As students look for scenes to photograph, art collector Stephen White sits on a wooden bench along Lankershim Boulevard, eating a husk-wrapped tamale bought from a sidewalk vendor.
This is his neighborhood, he says, and he takes delight in watching the 10 students prowl.
It was White’s idea to pair photographers with the community college students, who he said are already producing excellent work. He opened one of the first photo galleries in Los Angeles and was a founding member of the Getty’s Photographs Council.
Tom Anthony, 47, of Newhall, a photography student at College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, traveled with Halverson and other students to a nearby home construction site.
Anthony said that he had only recently switched from black-and-white photography to color. He was intrigued, he said, by Halverson’s “use of color and how she focuses on color in her images.”
So he photographed such things as a yellow tape and orange sandbags seen against the brown earthen background. “They’re very artificial colors in a landscape,” he said.
Peter Tokofsky, a Getty education manager, said that community colleges are playing a larger role in “training the next generation of photographers.”
The museum’s Photographs Council will pay to frame 40 of the best pictures taken by the students this weekend. The museum will arrange a traveling exhibit of the photos starting in February at Valley College and resuming in the fall of 2007 at the other three schools: College of the Canyons, East Los Angeles College and Santa Monica College.
The weekend culminated with a Sunday symposium in which the four photographers showed their work and described their techniques.
Christenberry advised the students to find an art form suiting their passion. “Make every attempt to find something you love -- that you’re truly in love with -- and push it, push it as hard as you can.”
*
