Here at the California Historical Society, we’ve been busy installing the upcoming exhibition Boomtowns:
How Photography Shaped Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Drawn from CHS’s extensive photography holdings, the show looks back at the
first one hundred years of photography in San Francisco and Los Angeles to
consider how the medium shaped both our impressions of these cities and the
bricks and mortar of the cities themselves.
Let’s
look closely at the composition. To make this image, the photographer was
likely standing on a dirt bluff adjacent to a newly built road. This might seem
like an innocuous detail, but it prompts the question: Why didn’t they shoot
from a closer vantage? Why show the sign so far in the distance, with the vast
valley sprawling out before them? We may never know for sure, but the viewpoint
conveys a burgeoning city rife with potential for developers, industrialists,
and new residents. In the foreground, the out-of-focus shrubs and undeveloped
land suggest that the region is wild and uninhabited, and thus ready to be
built up. At the same time, the newly built roads weaving through the frame, and
the small number of impressive houses being constructed throughout, convey that
the city is not without infrastructure. Come to Hollywoodland, the image seems
to say, and be a part of the exciting changes already taking place.
Boomtowns: How Photography Shaped Los Angeles and San Francisco runs October 12 and March 10, 2018.
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by Natalie Pellolio, Assistant Curator, and Erin Garcia, Managing Curator of Exhibitions
The
new medium of photography arrived in California just in time to witness the
state’s dramatic, and often violent and inequitable, transformation at the
hands of Americans. But photographs do not simply bear witness to events
unfolding before the camera: they also interpret these events and imbue them with
meaning. Sometimes subtle compositional choices can convey complex attitudes
and ideas. Consider, for example, this photograph of the original
“Hollywoodland” sign, taken by an unknown photographer in Los Angeles circa
1924–29 (fig. 1). At first glance, it seems straightforward—an objective record
of what Hollywood looked like before it was fully developed, and before the
“land” was dropped from its name. But it has so much more to say.
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| Photographer unknown, Hollywoodland, c. 1924-29. Gelatin silver print. California Historical Society. |
In the 1920s, a syndicate of developers, including
Harry Chandler of the Los Angeles Times,
planned a subdivision in the hills above Beachwood Canyon near Griffith Park.
Anticipating that the Mulholland Highway, then under construction, would
eventually connect to the site, the group erected what was meant to be a
temporary fifty-foot-high sign across the top of Mount Lee advertising the
development. It would become, after the last four letters were removed in 1949,
one of the most iconic landmarks in the world. Laborers with steam shovels
graded roads connecting the neighborhood’s streets with Mulholland Drive. Photographs
much like this one appeared in real estate brochures, suggesting that this picture
may have been taken to appeal to developers or to sell homes.
In
photography, what is not pictured can often be as revealing as what is. The
perception of Los Angeles as an empty canvas required obfuscating any signs of
an indigenous history, despite the fact that the region had been occupied by
humans for more than ten thousand years. This myth of Los Angeles as an empty
canvas is propagated by our Hollywoodland
image, which suggests that these newly built houses—and the bright white
sign watching over them—are the first-ever human marks on the chaparral-covered
land. Similarly, the storybook homes dotting the wooded canyons, designed in
the Spanish, French, and English styles, imply that Los Angeles emerged
as if from a fairy tale. All of this smooths over the turbulent and often
violent events underlying the region’s development, which involved unchecked
violence by Anglos against Mexicans, Native Americans, and Chinese.
Belying
the grotesque social realities of the day, this image would have come across as
nostalgic, evoking the pastoral rusticity of an imagined Spanish past. But look
closely and you can see how it, like so many other photographs in Boomtowns, reveals that nothing about the construction of California’s cities
was inevitable. They were built and rebuilt by labor, force of will, profit
imperatives, and the frame of the camera. We encourage you to visit this
exciting exhibition in person, and see what a crucial role the camera played in
building our state.
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by Natalie Pellolio, Assistant Curator, and Erin Garcia, Managing Curator of Exhibitions
