Words About Photographs

Words About Photographs

The First Seven Years of the Gallery

Frontmen, ILWU Local 13, Unhooking Cargo (plywood from Malaya) at the Port of Los Angeles

School of Policy, Planning, and Development,

Ralph and Goldy Lewis Hall

University of Southern California

Introduction

In the last seven years the School of Policy, Planning, and Development has exhibited a wide variety of document-photographs in its Gallery. The accompanying texts were meant to put those images into a research and scholarly context. Many were written by the photographers themselves, others were written by the curator. We present them here to remind ourselves of the range of concerns and interests of our School.

The School of Policy, Planning, and Development focuses on innovative governance and place-based solutions for communities worldwide. We view Los Angeles and Southern Californiaas an archive and a laboratory. As a research university, USC encourages its undergraduates to make actual research experience a part of their education, and many of these projects were done by undergraduates.

We have been grateful for the support we have received from the deans of the School, the ArchiveResearchCenter and the Office of the Provost, and, externally, the International Council for Shopping Centers Research Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts through USC’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture, and the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation. We are also grateful for the cooperation of the University Libraries in arranging for the archiving of these materials.

In the last year or two we have been fortunate to display some of the earlier exhibits in the gallery in the lobby of the Applied Social Sciences Library at USC. We thank Patricia Davis for this opportunity.

Martin H. Krieger

Curator of the Gallery

Professor of Planning

School of Policy, Planning, and Development

University of Southern California

Table of Contents [Photographer Listed in Brackets]

1. Southern California as a Microcosm of the World (January 2000) [Martin Krieger]

2. All the Malls of Southern California (Spring 2000) [Mitchell Glaser]

3. People Live Here: Every Place within Hoover-Jefferson-Vermont-Adams (Part of Census Tracts 2218 and 2219) (Fall 2000) [Fernando Samayoa]

4. Living in Huntington Park (Spring 2001) [Pablo Garcia and Maya Konieczny]

5. Union Pacific Avenue: An Industrial Neighborhood in Los Angeles (Fall 2001) [MK]

6. Medical Tijuana: Healthcare Entrepreneurship in a BorderCity (Winter 2001-2) [Mark Elliot]

7. Broadway Melodies: Harmonies and Counterpoints in the Line of Industrial Transformation (Spring 2002) [Sonia Rivas]

8. Electricity in Brick, Concrete, and Stone: Los Angeles Department of Water and Power Electricity Distribution Stations Nos. 1-20 (Summer 2002) [MK]

9. What Does Sustainability Look Like? (Winter 2002-3) [Krista Sloniowski]

10. Sacred Transformation: Armenian Churches in Los Angeles (Spring 2003) [Yeghig Keshishian]

11. The Other Side of the River: Some Industrial Blocks on the East Side of the Los AngelesRiver (Summer 2003) [MK]

12. Images of Berlin at the End of History (Fall 2003) [Berlin Laboratory]

13. Artifacts and Replacements: How Communities are Transformed (BoyleHeights) (Winter 2004) [Natalie Golnazarians and Jack Lam]

14. The Indoor Landscape of Los Angeles Manufacturing and Industry (Summer 2004) [MK]

15. Documenting the Urban Sensorium: East Cesar E. Chavez AvenueBreed Street (Fall 2004-Winter 2005) [Eduardo Arenas and Junhan Tan]

16. The Place of Memory: Memorials and Roadside Shrines in Los Angeles and in America (Spring 2005) [David Charles Sloane and Beverlie Conant Sloane]

17. Displaying Ethnic Los Angeles: Small Business Owners & Vernacular Visual Merchandising (Summer 2005) [Peter Reiss and MK]

18. Working at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach: Infrastructure as a Choreography of Machinery, People, and Goods (Fall 2005-Winter 2006) [MK]

19. Images of Development: Tanzania and Beijing, China (Spring 2006) [USC Faculty, and the Beijing Lab]

20. Infrastructure: The Interstices of Los Angeles Innervated by Water, Power, Agriculture, & Transport (Fall 2006) [MK]

1. Southern California as a Microcosm of the World (January 2000)

Over the last several years, I have been photographically documenting some of everyday urban life in Los Angeles. I want to develop an archive of images and Super-8 films useful for longer-term comparative work on the continuing transformations of a city. My goal is to be reasonably comprehensive, rather than accumulating a select and perhaps idiosyncratic set of images.

I am concerned with the infrastructure for life. The phenomena include commercial life (dry cleaners, nail parlors, trendy and not-so-trendy districts) and urban redevelopment (tear-downs in wealthy neighborhoods and the subsequent building of mansionettes). My idea is to cover a wide variety of similar types of phenomena—say, 100 or more mansionettes or 25 fabric stores in LA's fashion district. I focus on the façade of each building, in effect how people advertise themselves to the world. What is remarkable is the variety of each type, as well as the shared features of all the various representatives. I am especially interested in the detailed way in which each representative makes up the urban fabric. Often many of one type are agglomerated in a small area or district; other times, they are sprinkled everywhere. My theme is that what is everyday and ubiquitous is also particular and distinctive and local.
In every case, whether it be mansionettes or fabric stores or storefront churches, these places are marked by ethnic, national, or linguistic signs, some readily discerned by all, others rather more esoterically coded.
Buildings, their signage, and their context are strikingly informative, even if they are not Gothic cathedrals with the Bible writ large in their statues and structure. Yet they are as well modular, each one almost replaceable by its kin.
I began my photodocumentation project in order to get hold of the rapidly changing urban fabric of Los Angeles, because of vigorous and pulse-like economic development, and because of substantial flows of new immigrant groups over short periods of time, and earthquake and social unrest.
Rather than studying a small number of mega-projects, with their long and precarious histories, I wanted to attend to the informal and the smaller scale, and to the multiplicity and frequency of these changes, in their ubiquity and their variety. Attending to the vernacular and everyday, one discovers how urban redevelopment often takes place in this more disaggregated uncoordinated fashion, again marked by particular ethnic, national, and linguistic signs.
Why photographs? Since I focus on façades, the images are literally superficial. Photographs can provide a very high level of information—the writing on the walls and the signs, the design, the color, the real estate. My goal here is clear documentation, not fine art, not photojournalism, not the documentary tradition in photography. [MK]

2. All the Malls of Southern California (Spring 2000)

My name is Mitchell Glaser. I am a junior at the University of Southern California, in the School of Policy, Planning, and Development. In the spring semester of my sophomore year, I took one of the required courses in the Planning and Development major, "Design of the Good," with Professor Martin Krieger. As part of this course, each student was to work on a project related to design and tailored to his or her individual interests.
I have been fascinated with all aspects of urban development for as long as I can remember, but shopping centers have always been of particular interest to me. I remember the excitement I felt as a boy growing up in Phoenix whenever my family went to Metrocenter, the largest mall in Arizona. The mammoth building was impressive inside and out, with five department stores, over two hundred smaller stores, restaurants, banks, movie theatres, and an ice rink. Not only was it a major retail development, it was an institution in the Salt River Valley, a social center, a "downtown" in a city that lacked most of the traditional institutions of city life. This mixture of commerce, consumerism, and community fixed the shopping mall in my mind as a unique and essential part of our modern city and our modern society.
So when it came to develop the concept for this design project, I immediately thought to do something involving malls. After some discussion, Professor Krieger and I agreed that a visual documentation project on all of the malls in the Los Angeles area would be interesting and worthwhile. So I set out to catalogue the fifty-seven malls in Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, and San Bernardino counties, inside and out, in order to get a clear view of what malls are—how they look, how they operate, and how they interact with nature, the rest of the built environment, and the community. Over the course of eleven days in the months of February, March, and April 1999, I drove around the region and shot about 525 photos on twenty-one rolls of film. I think the end result is an accurate portrayal of the mall and mall culture in contemporary America.
Southern California is an appropriate place for this survey, with its reputation of being a center of car culture, suburban culture, and consumer culture—all the components of our post-war American lifestyle that made the mall what it is today. Despite its reputation, L.A. was not an innovator in this field. It was home to the nation's first major integrated shopping center managed by one party (Crenshaw Center in 1947), but it lagged in development of centers built around pedestrian malls (Seattle's Northgate in 1950) and in enclosed, climate-controlled centers (Minneapolis' Southdale in 1956). But malls have flourished here, and what one could say about malls here could be said about malls anywhere.
What these photos show is how the mall is not only a mechanism for selling consumer goods but also a consumer good itself. In 50 years, the basic concepts of mall development have not changed, but malls themselves are in a constant evolution. Consumer tastes and opinions, expressed in both sales volume and market surveys, determine what works and what doesn't, and where malls are headed. Changes in population, demographics, and competition have caused once-mighty malls to fall, with larger, more modern centers taking their place. There are several types of centers geared towards different market segments, their design and tenant mix unmistakably different. Furthermore, there is the ongoing addition, renovation, and remerchandising that remake the mall's image as times and tastes change.
But there is more to the mall than the business of retail. Malls are community centers, one of the few places in the city where people from every background come together. The mall is a controlled environment, an air-conditioned "Main Street" that has become an essential part of the suburban landscape and lifestyle. Its design and amenities are appreciated by the community and many feel a close relation to it. When a mall closes, not only is it a commercial failure, but it has also failed the community it served. The "downtown" is gone, and so is that unique sense of community.[Mitchell Glaser, Planning Undergraduate, USC]

I teach an undergraduate upper-division course, “Design of the Good,” about how value is embedded in designed things, programs, places, and institutions. The original impulse came from my reading Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790), in which it is argued that the aesthetic and the ethical have a similar logical or formal structure, although there is no applicable law (such as the golden rule) to aesthetic judgments. Aesthetic judgments are judgments of taste, neither immediate nor lawlike, but judgments where we demand of others that they agree with our judgments—even though they often disagree with us, and demand that we agree with them. As we go along in our discussion, we learn to point out features of the work that ought to allow someone else to see with their own eyes why a work is the way we claim it is.
So a second impulse comes out of criticism of works of art or literature, where particular details as well as architectonic and formal analysis are employed to point out what is going on in a work, its meanings, and the quality it may possess. In fact, such particulars and structures are never sufficient to decide if a work is of particularly high quality, because it is possible to confect a work that fulfills all the given details and structures, yet which is manifestly awful.
A third impulse comes from more general considerations of the nature of design, in particular the Argument from Design for the existence of God world is manifestly orderly, such order could not have happened by chance, and hence there must have been a Supreme Architect, or so it has been argued. Hume pointed out that the world could have been made by a group of craftsmen, who botched and bungled it until they got it to work at all.
When we went around the room in my class last year, each student indicating what they might study for its design, meaning, and quality, Mitchell Glaser mentioned "shopping centers." He was deadly serious, and as he testifies, he has been fascinated by shopping centers, and shopping malls in particular, since he was a toddler. We talked a bit more, and almost as a lark I suggested that he visit all the malls of Southern California. He took up the challenge, and this exhibition is the product of his traveling to all the "missions" of the late twentieth century.
What we hope to do in teaching is to convert our students' interests, fascinations, and obsessions into understanding and critical insight. In what way has this place been designed, what values are embedded in the design, and how might it be otherwise? What is wonderful here is to have all the malls in one place, to see them as expressions of commerce and fantasy. [MK]

3. People Live Here: Every Place within Hoover-Jefferson-Vermont-Adams (Part of Census Tracts 2218 and 2219) (Fall 2000)

I have been interested in photographically documenting everyday, ordinary Los Angeles life, parts and aspects of Los Angeles that make up its fabric but which are taken for granted. Fernando Samayoa ('00), a Planning and Development major, and a student from several of my classes, walked in one day and suggested that he photograph all the housing within a substantial area around campus. With the aid of Christopher Williamson, of the Geographic Information Systems Laboratory of USC, he settled on the area bounded by Hoover, Jefferson, Vermont, and Adams. And then, over the next few months during Spring semester of 2000, Fernando went out and photographed (almost) every place (home, business, sometimes alleys) in the area, more than 600 images. This is not a mechanical endeavor, since there are houses behind houses, there are streets within streets, there is life beyond the sidewalk. So in doing such a survey, not only is your eye educated to look and see what is ordinarily not noticed, your knowledge of urban planning and development allows you to see what is there and to see it as in part exemplifying what you learned in classes and studios. You will want to photograph some places from several aspects, so as to get hold of more of the complexities of a place.

To take photographs you have to slow down. For you are not on your way, walking briskly to someplace else in the neighborhood. You are here, right now, trying to figure out what is in front of you—and often that is not so clear as it might seem on first thought or even at first sight. Often, there are multiple layers and multiple uses. And, notably, you are on the particular streets within this area, not driving by on one of the main streets that bound it. For you could work at USC and drive by this area for twenty years, and never enter within this area except to shop in UniversityVillage.

But, of course, people live their lives here: Lots of students, lots of ordinary families, churches, businesses, even parts of USC. I wrote "almost" above because we are not sure we have photographed every place. There are those streets within streets and houses behind houses. So if you find you have been left out, please let us know. And, of course, neighborhoods are dynamic. If our time scale is decades, change is quite rapid. There is filtering, with housing becoming less well kept; maintenance, housing kept in good repair; and upgrading and gentrification, when housing stock is renovated and made "better" than new. Religious institutions settle in, perhaps grow or move, or decline. One of the purposes of this project is to document what is there, right now. For in ten years we can do another snapshot of the area to discover, by comparison and contrast, what has changed, what has persevered, and what has disappeared. Hence, it is vital that visual documentation not only be well annotated, but that it be archived in a place where it will not be forgotten or misplaced or destroyed. [MK]

4. Living in Huntington Park (Spring 2001)

Demographic transition, waves of immigration, and geographic segregation are again transforming Los Angeles, revitalizing and reforming its urban fabric. Huntington Park, neighboring South Los Angeles, is part of a network of small cities that in the past twenty years have redefined their place within the metropolis. Neither a danger zone nor lost space,Huntington Park is vital, rich with multi-generational family life, and exhibits remarkable inventiveness and self-reliance. Maya Konieczny and Pablo Garcia, seniors in the School of Architecture, have photographically documented the streetscape and who is on the street at what times of day, the entrepreneurial innovations and informal commercial activity, and the ways people use formerly neglected spaces, whether they be streets, alleys, or garages—so regenerating and enlivening a community.