Reading List

LA Reader

By Stephen Hilger

For this year’s “Reading List” column, Full Bleed asked photographer Stephen Hilger to discuss a selection of books that have advanced his thinking about this issue’s theme, ‘home’, in relation to his own work.

I’ve lived in different cities during my entire adult life, yet most of my photography focuses on Los Angeles, the city where I grew up. It pulls me home. There I can trace childhood memories and collective histories within the expansive, diverse, mutable and poetic place it is. During my youth I rode by car from place to place, as recurrent architectural markers blurred by the backseat window. I remember my surprise when restaurants or houses I knew suddenly disappeared from our daily routes. It seemed as if the entire city was a construction site. As a kid and then a teenager, the pausing of building projects during the weekends allowed me and my friends to immerse ourselves directly into the cycles of erasure and growth before us. We entered and exited these transforming spaces over chain link fences. When I left Los Angeles for New York and flew home with frequency, the aerial view from the window seat revealed an unending, inequitable sprawl. My arrivals and departures reminded me I no longer belonged to the city. I was now just visiting, and the aerial perspective allowed me to see the city less provincially and more broadly. 

My photographs reflect the ways in which Los Angeles absorbs me. I rely on looking and recording to make both personal histories and larger histories visible. My approach is also inspired by shelves of books authored by photographers, artists, and writers who explore LA’s pasts. I consider this selection of books as a field guide, or perhaps a psychological-social-geographical map of Los Angeles. Some of these books I discovered at Book Soup on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, just a few minutes from my childhood home and the area surveyed by Edward Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip, in which the conceptual artist photographed each building on both sides of Sunset decades earlier in 1966. In The History of Forgetting, Norman M. Klein channels Walter Benjamin as he describes urban ruins as “shells of faded memory.” The author continues: “The built landscape is both political critique and nostalgia.” These poles push and pull at my work and are also present in the books below. I recommend them for anyone who is interested in Los Angeles and in exploring the tension between longing for home and, simultaneously, questioning how that place was built. 

Catherine Opie

(The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1997)

Catherine Opie’s first of many solo museum exhibitions, in the late nineties the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles featured two series of panoramic photographs depicting architectural motifs particular to LA: freeways and strip malls. The photographer’s elongated views of these structures are devoid of traffic and human presence. The city’s colossus freeways appear as if they were monuments from a lost civilization. These photographs were a revelation to me when I encountered them as a college student who had only recently picked up a camera. In Opie’s photographs, I could see how perfectly the panoramic format mirrored the specific architectural subjects she investigates, inspiring me to carefully consider the relationship between form and subject in my own photography. 

The handsome exhibition catalog faithfully represents the six by seventeen-centimeter, platinum-palladium photographs of the freeways true to scale and includes an early interview with the artist that details the formal and social drivers of the work. I bought the volume on the spot and have returned to it again and again. The images evoke Catherine Opie’s experience commuting on LA’s freeways, even as Opie acknowledges that these roads have divided communities.

The photographs in my recent book In the Alley share with Opie’s pictures of freeways and strip malls the utilization of a panoramic camera, which I use to describe long alleys in Beverly Hills. Also like Opie, my photographs observe how the city is planned and built, depicting the alleys behind houses in the affluent neighborhood. Novelist Matthew Specktor writes in an essay accompanying In the Alley, that the work displays information hiding in plain sight, “inverting the expected order so that the world we are used to seeing as dominant––that of rich people, the one that is usually fetishized or glamorized by the lens––is concealed, while that which is of often overlooked is instead foregrounded.”

Don Normark, Chávez Ravine 1949: A Los Angeles Story

(Chronicle Books, 1999)

In 1948, photography student Don Normark hiked up a hillside near downtown Los Angeles in search of a postcard view of LA for a class assignment. From the summit, Normark saw a small, Mexican-American village settled in the hillsides of Chávez Ravine. Normark spent one year photographing the trio of neighborhoods there—La Loma, Palo Verde, and Bishop—unaware that the residents would be soon evicted to make way for a public housing project that was never realized. The remnants of the villages’ houses and public school were literally buried under the earth to make way for Dodger Stadium. The story of the Chávez Ravine is too faintly recalled today, but this important book remembers the vibrant Latino community through Normark’s photographs, made mostly in 1949 before the disenfranchisement of more than one thousand Mexican-American families, presented alongside interviews conducted by the photographer and former residents during later years. Chávez Ravine 1949 presents memories of a place and time that are at once nostalgic and politically aware. 

Robert Adams, Los Angeles Spring

(Aperture, 1986; 2nd ed., Steidl, 2023)

In Los Angeles Spring, Robert Adams portrays former orange groves and agricultural lands ripped apart by the expanding Interstate-10 freeway, which cuts across what was once known as the Orange Empire and is known as the Inland Empire today. Adams’ photographs remind me of the orange grove near my home where I played during the late seventies and early eighties. Many of the trees in the grove we visited were sick and gnarled but they still bore fruit. I would crawl through an opening in the fence to collect the oranges and bring them home for juicing. There were even times when my friends and I used the fruit as ammunition, launching the oranges at each other, or worse, unexpecting passersby. 

During the same period, Robert Adams returned to the Los Angeles Basin, the region where he had gone to college at the University of Redlands in the late fifties. The succession of growing cities just east of Los Angeles—Ontario, Fontana, Colton, and Redlands—preoccupied the photographer for years as he pointed his camera towards the vestiges of the area’s depleted citrus groves. In a sequence of shifting perspectives throughout the area, Adams gives evidence to the razed natural landscape deemed necessary for urban growth. Although Adams finds verdancy within this wasteland, I wonder if he was chasing down a more fertile memory. A classic published by Aperture in 1986, Los Angeles Spring was recently republished in a deluxe, expanded edition from Steidl. 

Guadalupe Rosales, Map Pointz: A Collective Memory

(Little Big Man, 2018)

Guadalupe Rosales is well known for highlighting collective archives of vernacular photographs and ephemera on her Instagram pages  (@veteranas_and_rucas) and (@map_pointz). In her online archives, her poignant installations, sculpture, and photography, and in her book Map Pointz, Rosales shines light on the Southern California Latinx youth culture communities of her adolescence. In a text that extends throughout the book Rosales explains, “Teenagers, myself included, were creating unique spaces in the midst of gang violence, the 1992 LA Riots, and other racial injustices like Proposition 187.” In her work, Rosales’ shares collective memories of party crews who would travel by car to gather at backyard kickbacks and warehouse raves. Party goers shared directions to “map points” where they would meet up to find the next steps to parties while keeping the gatherings underground and out of sight to the police. Rosales text concludes, “This book is about paying respect, preserving, honoring and decriminalizing youth subcultures. This book is about unlearning, relearning, and reexamining our history as youth in SoCal. It is also honoring those who we’ve lost in time.”

Marilyn Monroe, 1926-1962

(Roy Colmer, 2003)

The red, spiral-bound, booklet Marilyn Monroe, 1926-1962, resembles a tiny photo album or address book. One of a handful of self-published books by the painter-turned-conceptual photographer Roy Colmer, it is simple in its premise. Marilyn Monroe sequentially lists the forty-seven places the famed sex symbol lived from her birth to her ill-fated death at the age of thirty-six. “The LA General Hospital at 5454 Wilshire Boulevard” is the first listing, followed by an orphanage, foster homes, hotels, clubs, apartments, bungalows, houses, and estates in which she lived. Monroe’s transience within LA is poignantly evocative of her life’s tragic trajectory. Her movements through the city would also intersect with my own family’s history. My grandmother and then my mother would later live in the house previously shared by Monroe and her husband Joe DiMaggio in 1954. “12305 Fifth Helena Drive, Brentwood, California, 1962” is the last and the only home that Monroe owned. In 2023, the coveted property faced demolition with plans to rebuild on the site before the Los Angeles City Commission intervened to preserve the house in which Monroe died. For the time being, it still stands. 

Judith Freeman, The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved

(Vintage Books, 2007)

When the story broke about the discovery of a lost poem by Raymond Chandler, author Judith Freeman wrote in the Los Angeles Times that the celebrated LA noir novelist shares the same “iconic appeal” of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. Having written extensively about Chandler in the past, Freeman had received many messages regarding the find, so she took a close look at the poem, a requiem written by Chandler for his wife, Cissy Pascal, who had died a few months before it was written, and found it immediately familiar: Decades earlier, she had included it in her brilliant double biography of Chandler and his older wife Cissy Pascal, The Long Embrace. In Freeman’s words, “The long-lost poem was not long-lost at all.” 

Years earlier, while reading Chandler’s letters, Freeman had noticed the author’s numerous return addresses and realized that the couple had lived in thirty-five different homes in Los Angeles and Southern California. In The Long Embrace, Freeman tracks down each of their residences to reveal the novelist’s multi-angled view of Los Angeles while chronicling the couple’s relationship and its influence on Chandler’s writing. Freeman recounts director Billy Wilder saying that of all the individuals he worked with, Chandler and Monroe were the two that people wanted to know about most: “they were both enigmas.”

When visiting Los Angeles, I often think of Chandler, his work, and his influence. The film The Long Goodbye directed by Robert Altman, a seventies adaptation of Chandler’s novel, is a touchstone for me. Altman’s version, luminously and itinerantly filmed on location throughout the city, seems so familiar. Like detective Philip Marlowe, I drive around the city searching for clues to a vanishing Los Angeles.

Jonathan Gold, Counter Intelligence: Where to Eat in the Real Los Angeles

(LA Weekly Books, 2000)

After spending the morning and early afternoon photographing, when the mid-day sun burns too brightly for me to work, I’ll break for lunch. Jonathan Gold’s Counter Intelligence anthologizes more than two hundred LA restaurant reviews by this Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic. Sadly, more than half of the places he details in the book have closed, but how pleasing to savor Los Angeles’ diverse, authentic cultures as described by Gold. Visiting many of these restaurants, Gold writes, involves “a mild sense of dislocation, of tripping into a rabbit hole and popping up in some wholly unexpected location.” Gold once proclaimed his ambition to eat at every single restaurant on Pico Boulevard, the fifteen-mile street that stretches from downtown LA to the beach, “starting with the fried yucca dish served at a pupuseria near the downtown end and working methodically westward toward the chili fries at Tom's No. 5 near the beach”. 

Anthony Hernandez

(D.A.P. / San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2016)

Driving down Beverly Boulevard one day, I saw Anthony Hernandez standing on the sidewalk, waiting. The photographer had his equipment on hand—his camera and tripod positioned behind a portable metal screen that he photographs through. Waiting is an important motif in Hernandez’ work, including in his photographs of LA residents waiting at bus stops throughout the city, and his near-abstract depictions of what is seen by Angelenos waiting in line for social services. For more than six decades, Hernandez has made visible the ignored and unseen realities of this immense metropolis. Anthony Hernandez, the retrospective exhibition and catalog organized by San Francisco Museum of Art photography curator Erin O’ Toole, provides the most comprehensive look at Hernandez’ incomparable vision of Los Angeles. The volume includes an essential dialogue between him and photographer Lewis Baltz, first published in Hernandez’ Landscapes from the Homeless, in which Hernandez describes spaces along the freeways where unhoused people shelter: “A ribbon of life for the real city but a wasteland for the forgotten.” 

Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio

(The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2023)

Recently, I was back at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles to see Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio’s first museum show—part of the MOCA Focus program which featured Catherine Opie’s work twenty-five years earlier. Arriving at the cool, industrial-feeling museum and seeing Aparicio’s installation, I could sense the warm and boundless energy of the bustling streets and sidewalks that inspire his work. Aparicio’s large-scale Caucho (rubber) works on view trace multiple layers of history by creating indexical rubber casts from the trunks of LA’s ubiquitous ficus trees, many of which the city has marked for removal. Aparicio paints on fluid rubber from trees native to El Salvador, where the artist’s family is from, as are the immigrant communities who live in the neighborhoods where the trees marked for demolition are rooted. He then lifts the hardened rubber impressions of residual bark, painted and scratched graffiti, smog and other detritus, and unfurls the remains to hang on, or off, the exhibition wall. Aparicio’s process-laden act memorializes the present conditions of immigrant life, while simultaneously referencing the histories of the Spanish imperial rubber trade in Central and South America, and Indigenous Peoples’ use of rubber technology before their colonization by Spain.

Norman M. Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory

(Verso, 1997, Updated ed., 2008)

Norman Klein’s vivid, hybrid book, The History of Forgetting, oscillates between documentary and fictive approaches to excavate stories about communities and places in Los Angeles that are drastically altered or removed, their memories erased. Klein writes, “Los Angeles remains the most photographed and least remembered city in the world.” Klein’s assertion challenges me to make photographs in response to both smaller and larger histories that deserve to be remembered. 

I first read The History of Forgetting when I was photographing the Ambassador Hotel shortly before and during its demolition in 2005. The once grand hotel had been home to some of the first Academy Award ceremonies during the thirties and forties. Marilyn Monroe was discovered by a modeling agency at the hotel’s poolside in 1945. Harry Belafonte, Judy Garland, and countless other legends performed at its night club, the Cocoanut Grove. In 1968, presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in the Ambassador’s kitchen. No longer a functioning hotel after 1989, the massive structure stood in ruins as a monument to Los Angeles’ gilded legacy, its mythologies, and the city’s inability to remember its own history. 

Since the building was razed, I have photographed the neighborhood served by a complex of public schools built on the hotel’s footprint. One day, like so much of LA, this community and its structures will surely change beyond recognition. I read Klein’s book as an invitation to resist our collective failure to remember—by training my eyes not only on the past, but also on the city’s fluctuating present.

Stephen Hilger is a photographer whose work traces personal and historical memory. Stephen Hilger: In the Alley, a book of color photographs of service passageways behind private residences in Beverly Hills, was published by Purple Martin Press in 2023. He is an associate professor of photography at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.