I grew up in a small Pennsylvania Borough. I was fearlessly curious so I ran away a lot. One of my favorite destinations was New York’s Washington Square Park and the Village.
While attending a University in Ohio I traveled to Detroit, D.C.,Chicago, Boston, Miami. Later I stopped briefly in Denver, Phoenix, Dallas, Sante Fe, and San Diego before discovering Los Angeles in the late 1970s. I was immediately fascinated with LA.. The cultural diversity, the non conformity had a lot to do with my getting a camera and spending time driving around the city taking pictures of everything and anything that attracted my attention.
Since I came to LA as an actor I photographed the theaters and film studios first. I shot the “hot spots” of the day that were talked about by the celebrities I met.
Many of the attractions I photographed in the late 70s and 80s have disappeared. Some, of course, relocated but others, like Joe Allen’s, Schwab’s, The Speakeasy, The Source, SouthTown, Green’s, are gone. I never expected that.
Fortunately, the more famous night clubs on the strip have remained unchanged. The La Brea Tar Pits, with it’s museum and annual mask festival are still an attraction. The public tennis courts (where I happened on a dead body early one morning), Charlie Chaplin’s orange castle-like abode, and Griffith Park are also unchanged even after over three decades. They appear like a memory of fishing as a kid in Pa. when I happened upon the scene of a lone angler in Echo Park’s Silver Lake.
The Capitol Records building still spirals into the smoggy Hollywood horizon. A roadside sign still warns of entering Beverly HIlls. The Blue Whale still occupies an entire city block. The rock jetty still lures an occasional unsuspecting soul out onto it during high stormy seas where they are swept away and lost forever.
Griffith Park and Glendale’s Brand Library will always be beautiful, I suspect and the world famous Hollywood Sign was saved by Hugh Hefner recently.
But, (like the car load of young people who thought the mid city Lake Hollywood was isolated and so ideal place to aim a gun at me as I completed the 3.3 mile jog), it’s the people who continue to amaze me. Its like a Disney film where the cast changes but the story of the wicked, wacky and wonderful Hollywood stays the same.
From the early days of sitting across the street from the Chinese Theatre with a camera catching the arrest of a woman naked below the waist, or shooting Mr. Doomsday, or Superman(?) to catching an occasional celebrity…(Mr. Marty Feldman passed shortly after this photo. Eerily, only half the photo appeared when developed)… or the Olympic Torch passing by my front lawn… To the semi nude woman on the back of a freeway motorcycle, or a small circus in the middle of Hollywood, or star studded graffiti on the side of a Hollywood business, or the homeless man chasing a pigeon on Ala Vera Street, and the crowds attracted to the beaches,LA is amazing. Even with the mud slides, the car crunching traffic or tragic fatalities tarped in the middle of the street, LA has always proven to be provocatively interesting.
From the macabre to the sexually titillating, there is always some reason to carry a camera.
What self respecting street photographer could resist carrying a point and shoot and driving around the block to get a shot of a homeless couple using a bus stop bench for an afternoon public display of affection? Certainly not me. For me, LA will always be the same strange wonderland I call home.
