Speech before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on August 3,  2000:

Imagining Los Angeles
Photographs of a 20^th Century City

Speakers:  Carla Lazzareschi
                   Stacey R. Strickler

Carla Lazzareschi

Whenever I’m asked to speak about this book, the same question invariably comes up:  “Why is it titled Imagining Los Angeles?  Shouldn’t it be “Images of Los Angeles?”  After all, it is a book of photographs.  My answer is always the same:  First, let’s start with our subtitle: “Photographs of a 20^th Century City.”  We started from a rather heady observation that Los Angeles is the largest city in the world to come of age in the 20^th Century.  There are larger and perhaps more important cities, of course, but all of these matured before the 20^th century.  Los Angeles, by contrast, grew from a dusty town of slightly more than 100,000 residents to more than 3.5 million in 100 years.  Within these ten decades, Angelenos either initiated or enthusiastically allowed their city to be shaped by virtually every single important discovery or creation in the 20^th Century—the automobile, the airplane and the ensuing aerospace industry, Hollywood.  Even the Internet, arguably the most significant creation in the Century’s closing years, traces its history to UCLA.

Our proposition, perhaps only slightly audacious, is nothing less than this:  Los Angeles is the world’s quintessential 20^th century city and uniquely reflects for better and for worse all the significant influences of those 100 years.  Now for our title,  Imaging Los Angeles.  If you think back to what the city was at the turn of the century, you cannot help but be struck by the fact that, with the exception of its sun-blessed climate, Los Angeles had very few natural amenities to propel its emergence as a world-class city.  There was no reliable water supply, no natural port, precious few natural resources. In short, all the ingredients that have provided the springboards for the development of most great metropolises were absent here, save for one:  Its people. 

Our proposition, and that of celebrated author, Carrie McWilliams in Island on the Land, is that Los Angeles’ explosion unto the world stage was not an accident of geography.  Rather, it is the result of being actively conjured into existence by the people who live here and continue to live here today.  Imagining Los Angeles takes the point of view that our city was consciously willed, indeed, imagined into existence by its residents.  The men and women who settled here didn’t see the region’s limitations as impediments.  They saw challenges and they rose to meet them.   This is what Imagining Los Angeles celebrates—the sense of possibility in the face of improbability.  As journalists, not historians, we assembled 175 photos in Imagining Los Angeles that portray and pay homage to this spirit.  We sought out and consciously selected photos that show both the beneficial results of that determination and its darker side.  Certainly, we’ve highlighted some of the big names in our history—William Mulholland, the Chandler family, Walt Disney, Donald Douglas, John Northrop, the Lockheed brothers, Tom Bradley and the studio moguls, but we also celebrate the large number of every-day people from all over the globe who made Los Angeles their home and, in the process, made this city what it is today—a city of seemingly infinite diversity.  Look at the photos of the tortilla makers, the orange packer, the gold panner, the star-struck hopefuls outside the gate of Paramount Studios, the ladies shopping for refrigerators on the opening day of the appliance department of the May Company, the little girls waving Japanese and American flags, the young boys at Chavez Ravine.  Los Angeles was home to all these people.  At its best, the city offered them the promise of betterment in an environment where possibility was always open-ended.

While we looked to illustrate how we lived our lives as Angelenos we also set out to show how what we have crated for ourselves has directly affected the way the rest of the world lives.  We wanted to show nothing less than the impact these 100 years in Los Angeles have had on every other section of the globe.  It is hardly inconsequential.  Consider our home-grown exports—Hollywood, the aircraft and aerospace industries, rocket science that had led us to the moon and to Mars, the freeways that sometimes take us nowhere slowly, the Rose Parade that is now watched by some 350 million people worldwide, the hula hoop, Barbie. And what about television?  Who can doubt the influence that the Ozzie and Harriet sitcom or Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show has had as it beamed a Southern California sensibility to the rest of the world?  

We’re often asked why Imagining Los Angeles is different from the other photo books that have been compiled about Los Angeles.  That’s simple—we’re journalists, not historians.  We bring a sensibility of people who are looking for the way people live, not just the important events and important civic leaders.  We wanted to find photos that show what was and still is emblematic about living in Los Angeles.  We were also looking for the historical references and antecedents for why Los Angeles is the way it is now.  We tried to trace through those photos our love-hate relationship with the automobile and public transportation, or obsession with health and fitness, our seemingly continual series of public trust breaches by the police, our ability to live anonymously amidst great celebrity. 

Finally, we wanted to show how the spirit that has helped create Los Angeles is needed more than ever today to help the city address the challenges it faces because of the very manner in which our city was created and the way we have come to live.  We need creative and imaginative ways to address our continuing dependence on our scarce water supply.  We must find the resources that competently educate the thousands of youngsters entering school each year.  We need to slow the overcrowding of our streets and freeways and our often-crippling dependence on the automobile.  We need to police the police as much as we do the criminal elements.  As a result of this book project, we came to believe that the inventiveness and creativity that spawned our city, the spirit that we celebrate in Imagining Los Angeles is exactly what’s needed today to fashion answers to our most pressing and perplexing dilemmas.  Surely, Imagining Los Angeles offers us all hope that our civic DNA holds the genetic substance that will allow us to collectively rise to this challenge.

Stacey will now explain a little bit in detail the process that we followed in selecting these photos, how she researched the archives throughout the region to come up with the various candidates, and then the process that we used to select them and to research their provenance and also what they were.  We didn’t often know what they were, and Stacey will tell us how she did that.

Thank you.

  Stacey Strickler

  Good evening.  As Carla mentioned, I’m a photojournalist so I’m a little bit used to having my eye trained on everybody and not everybody’s eyes trained on me, so excuse me if I seem a little nervous.

  Tonight I’m going to talk about my role as a photo editor on this project, the criteria for how we selected some of the images, and then I’m going to hold up the book and show you what some of my favorite images are.

  The first thing that everybody wants to know about my role in this project is how many photographs I looked at, so in preparation for this talk tonight I did a little calculation.  I know what it felt like, but I really wanted to know what the actual number was.  In the back of the book are photo credits, and I think that there are about 17 credits which represent maybe one-half to two-thirds of the institutions I visited.  I looked up in the repository directory what each institution listed as their complete holdings and I calculated one-tenth of each holding and then, to be conservative, cut that number in half and came up with a number of nearly 100,000 photos.   So, although I’ve looked at a lot of pictures, that tells you that there are a lot of images of Los Angeles that I have not seen.  I just scratched the surface.

  One of the reasons that there are so many pictures of Los Angeles is because photography was invented 58 years after the founding of Los Angeles and about 23 years before its incorporation, so although we were only focusing on the 20^th century, Los Angeles has a very rich collection of history in photographic images.  I started my search at the Los Angles Times, and I literally sat in their archives.  I don’t know if you all are familiar with archive terms, but they’re called ‘stacks” at the Los Angeles Times and I don’t know how many linear feet of photos they have, but an entire room is stacked to the ceiling with photographic files. I would go in there on a Saturday or Sunday morning about 11:00 a.m. and I would stay until 6:00 p.m.  I would just sit in these photo achieves and leaf my way through them and work my way down the list and write down other ideas that I got as I was looking.  For every one I crossed off my list, I came up with two or three more than I thought might be an interesting angle to research.

  I extended my research, after visiting the L.A. Times, to the more obvious archives, like USC an UCLA, and I found the archives that I needed to visit by looking in what’s called “The Archival and Manuscript Repositories.”  In California it’s a directory of archival repositories and each archive lists what their holdings are and contact information, and I would make an appointment and go visit.  Some of the places had an easier protocol than others.  There’s a wonderful person at the USC Regional History Center with whom I worked and she allowed me to sit in her archives and look through every single Dick Whittington picture.  I called her the other day and I asked her, “How many prints do you have?” and she said “over 7,000.”  Other places, like UCLA, were a little bit more difficult to deal with.  They have a small collection of Los Angeles Times images that the Times donated to them, but they keep them off-site, so you have to make a request for images from their list and go back the next day and you can only request five boxes at a time.  So if the images you want are in different boxes, you can only pick five pictures per day.  So that made it a little bit challenging.

  After I exhausted the primary archives, I went to what I call my secondary archives, which were a little narrower in focus.  They were places like the Glendale  Public Library and the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research.  That allowed me to get a little bit more specific when we were narrowing our focus on the book.  Once those were exhausted, I went to what I call my tertiary resources, which were private individual, publications such as Low-Rider Magazine, Peterson Publishing, and the Jewish Home for the Aging, to name a few.  So this really allowed me to collect a nice well-rounded collection of images for the book. 

  Part of what I was trying to do in this project was to collect images that no one had ever seen.  We really wanted a fresh look, a fresh perspective, so by going to the individual in the smaller archives I was able to dig up some images that I hope have surprised and titillated and captivated you.

  My assignment was really broken into three phases:  When Carla approached me about the project the first thing she said, and basically the only thing she said, was “Find images that are emblematic of Los Angeles.”  Not being from Los Angeles, that conjured up lots of things in my mind. I moved out here for the film industry, so I can relate to the people in the photograph of the hopefuls at the casting call at Paramount Pictures.   I had hopes of becoming big in the film industry as well.  As I said, I’m a photojournalist and I was doing camera, I was not trying to be an actress.  So once I had gotten a little bit of a perspective on what I felt were the emblematic images of Los Angeles, I tried to make a little bit of a visual sense of this collection.

  I tried to look for a common theme, a common thread, tried to pair some images up, and just start to make a little bit of a story.  We tried to put a little bit of structure and build a basic skeleton and after we had built this basic outline of a book that had some sort of perspective and point of view, the four editors would get together about once a month and literally lay out Xerox copies on the floor and look at everything that I had collected.  [We would] pair pictures together and think, “Oh, if we put this over with this picture, look at this wonder little story that’s emerging, and look at this theme over here,” and as we did that, I think we did that for about six months, and during this process after each meeting I would then have my assignment, my task list, and sometimes it was to find specific images.

  Like Carla said, we knew that Johnny Carson was an influence in television and entertainment, so I knew I had to find a picture of Johnny Carson. Of course, I didn’t want to have just any ordinary picture, I wanted one that would strike some sort of response in people. I was always trying to find something unusual or unfamiliar. I also had a more vague assignment: to find images to support a theme, such as the jobs that were available in the movie industry, the aerospace industry, citrus, things that portrayed California life style or climate, what drew people here.  It was up to me to kind of interpret what that meant.  I loved the review in the L.A. Times that said the pictures were selected and arranged with a little bit of a barbed wit.  It gave me great pleasure to read that because I really wanted to have a different point of view on this project.  Sometimes I was surprised by images that perfectly illustrated the point that we were trying to make.