Tag: Fujifilm

Hunting Down Clouds on the Urban Fringe.

Posted in PhotographyTagged , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Yesterday seemed like a good day to drive up to Santa Clarita or thereabouts for photos, a destination I hardly visit though it’s only 30 minutes away.

There were dark clouds in the sky which excited me. 

My friend and I got on the 405 north, driving next to the vehicles speeding by at 70, 80 and 90 miles per hour.

The freeways intersected, and we got onto the 5, and then exited Magic Mountain Parkway and turned north up The Old Road.

The names sounded magical and mythical and western, and you half expected to meet Wyatt Earp and drive into some town with wooden sidewalks, saloons and horses tied to posts, but all I saw were office buildings, shopping centers, and hills covered in mass housing with stage names; motels, hotels, and industrial parks with white siding on roads and no people. In fact, there were hardly any people anywhere, just cars, trucks, buildings and gray skies.

We drove on, looking for some abandoned bridge over the Santa Clara River, but we never found it. 

We looked, in vain, for a vantage point, a scenic rest, a hiking trail. Were there no public lands set aside for hiking or walking or biking or strolling?

Out in the distance, across the Santa Clara River, at the end of the eight-lane wide Commerce Center Drive, crossing under Highway 126, we stopped at Henry Mayo Drive where a “No Trespassing’ sign affixed to a steel fence guarded the riverbed and unusable paved trail. Green hills, yellow flowers, mesas and a panorama of Western Sky, unlawful to enter. A homely trailer park behind by a tall vinyl fence shielded its inhabitants from having to look beyond their entrapped dwellings.

Was this that trailer park that regularly floods during heavy rains? I couldn’t recall.

Not far away was the Chiquita Canyon Landfill, another toxic site in the news, infamous for sickening its neighbors with poisonous fumes. 

We had passed many churches along the way, but for such a spirit rich area, the environs seemed godless, a place where powerful ignoramuses in charge of money and land had defiled God’s natural beauty and turned everything into an enterprise of private capital, and failed to erect anything with a soul, an architecture or an emotion.

Still looking for a nice photo, we drove into the rear end of Magic Mountain, up an untraveled road that ended at the security entrance of the theme park. A stop sign was marooned in asphalt. More scary signs warned visitors they had to yield to authority and stay off forbidden land. I took some photos from the lot, beyond the property, where nature, somewhat defiled, still reigned, in a bed of trash and abandoned steel parts. 

Walking Along the 6th Street Bridge.

Posted in ArchitectureTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I finally made it down to the 6th Street Bridge.

It’s an impressive structure that leaps and struts and flies over rail tracks and factories, electric yards and the river. It is startlingly plain, almost crude in its sculpted mass and bending arches. There are raw bolts attaching the cables to the concrete. Steel fences stretch along the pedestrian walkway. Dark shadows and blinding sun mark the bridge from beginning to end.

Unyielding in substance, rigid, unforgiving, brutal; it is a stage for fast cars, reckless driving and unintentional suicide. But also a balletic performance of geometric shapes and unexpected revelations along the way.

Mute yet expressive, untested in the long term, it is a baby of this metropolis. And born to a city that abandoned it to a wasteland which one day may be remade with trees, parks and apartments; or left behind to become yet another great, unfulfilled California promise.

Walking here last Saturday, August 26th, I thought of the late Mike Davis (City of Quartz) who wrote brutally and trenchantly about Los Angeles.

I don’t have his exact words, but in that book he described an architecture of barbed wire, steel gates, security cameras, the way this city is set up like a penitentiary with hostile inmates surrounded by deterrents, police and threatening lethality.

The 6th Street Bridge, ironically, has earned a reputation for criminal mayhem: daredevil driving and people who climb upon the arches to show off. I saw no rowdiness, in fact the road was remarkably empty and we only passed a few pedestrians. But in all directions artificial and man made structures are the entirety. Absolutely nothing is natural. The lone exception I saw was a cellphone tower who identified as a palm tree.

Return to East Rustic Road.

Posted in PhotographyTagged , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

One sweltering day, sometime in July 2012, I left Van Nuys with my camera to escape the 105 degree heat.

I got off the 405 and drove west, towards the ocean, along San Vicente, until I came into a picturesque canyon, shrouded in fog. I parked my car and ventured on foot to photograph the trees and the architecture in cool, refreshing tranquility.

I walked up East Rustic Road where there was, indeed, rusticity in nature and architecture. I stopped on the sidewalk along the street and beheld the glory of clouds coming down from the hills. All around were birds and flowers, fragrance and song.

And then, suddenly, a shrill voice yelled at me, “Why are you photographing mailboxes on this street!” 

Dazed, stunned, I was speechless. 

Who the hell was screaming at me? I looked around and an old woman came out of a garage of a house.

“I was driving up the street and saw you taking pictures of all the mailboxes! What are you doing here!” she demanded.

Now pissed off that I was being interrogated, and my right to walk and photograph on a public street was being infringed upon; appalled at her lying and false charges; I talked back. I said something like who are you to ask me? Did I need a permit to take a photo? Did I need to ask your permission to photograph a cloud?

“I have a right to know!” she screamed again.

Then an old man (her husband?) came out the front door and yelled, “If you don’t get off our street we are calling the Santa Monica Police!”

Not eager to incite, I walked away.

My beautiful, serene, moment of enjoyment was spoiled by these two irrational people.

I vowed that one day I would come back here and shoot photos again, perhaps some portraits of an actor.

This past weekend, nine years later, I did just that. Without incident.

Model: Cheyne Hannegan

We Have to Wait for What we Want.

Posted in Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Like most everything these days, we have to wait for what we want.

So it is with the rains.

They are only now showing up, in late January, three separate storms, arriving as they do in Los Angeles from the north, with a slow, steady buildup of gray clouds in the sky, perhaps the only event in our region that telegraphs its arrival with deliberate and reserved politeness.

After the first storm, we went up to Mulholland Drive where the winds were blowing and the sky was clear and the ground saturated.

From there you could see across the San Fernando Valley and into the distant San Gabriels shrouded under clouds of her own.

There is only time of year I truly adore in Southern California, and it is right now. Soon the miserly precipitation will end and the months of heat and smog will rear up again.

But right now there is glory in the sky and the views.