Chance Encounters

Sidebar Text

The artist spent seven years going to chance-selected spots across the 1,287.75 square miles of urban Los Angeles County. This photographic sampling project is controlled by a map gridded into 5,151 quarter-mile squares. McCulloh begins each day of photography by pulling chance coordinates that select a random quarter-mile square. McCulloh then travels to that quarter-mile square with a single camera and 18mm wide angle lens, speaking with almost everyone he encounters.

The project’s core is the Dada/Surrealist idea that chance can liberate us from the limitations of preconception, intention, and self. The artist has driven more than 22,000 miles and made 23,000 photographs.

“McCulloh’s working method avoids pitfalls by adopting the Dadaist strategy of leaving things to chance,” states Los Angeles Times art critic William Wilson. “He selects areas at random, spending a day shooting whatever he finds – beach, slum or riverbed slime.” The results, writes Wilson, are “intrinsically fascinating, sociologically revealing and artistically instructive…. The exhibition’s melding of the intimate and the epic, simply put, add up to the best thing of its kind I’ve ever seen.”

Photographs from Chance Encounters have been exhibited and published widely. A book and traveling exhibition were originated by the California Museum of Photography.

“An extension of the traditions of street photography, social documentary photography, oral history and Surrealist chance operations. As such, it is grounded in some of the century’s most powerful conceptual currents.” —Jonathan Green, photo historian, director California Museum of Photography

“In order to take both his own preconceptions and popular constructions out of the picture, Douglas McCulloh has done something clever and simple. McCulloh merely merged the tradition of social documentary photography á la Robert Frank with the Surrealist approach of creating a system that forces the artist to act at the mercy of chance.” — Christopher Miles, ArtWeek

 

Photo Description

On his days off, D’ihigi rides his horses south along the L.A. River as far as the Long Beach Boulevard bridge and beyond. He grew up in Watts, but became a professional jockey riding thoroughbreds at the big Southern California tracks because of a great grandfather who tended horses on a southern plantation.

Anthony X floats above his house in the late afternoon. "It's peaceful. I could do this for hours." He offered advice to a neighbor girl who still wore a cast from an accident on the trampoline. "Just stay away from the edge."

Lucille X in front of the house her father bought in 1930. Her only son is dead of cancer. "You look at all this. How can anybody say it all came from nothing, from mud? Science is the biggest lie. All the scientists in the world couldn't even make that bird there." We picked daffodils in her back yard and she gave me a bunch to take home to my wife.

Ryan X and Joel X out vandalizing the construction equipment that was transforming the last open field in their neighborhood into a set of industrial buildings. When I asked them what they would do if the police came, they said, "We'd hide our faces and run."

This image of a man looking through spread fingers was posted throughout Los Angeles for a short period of time during the middle of 1995. I have photographs of it on billboards and benches and the sides of transit buses roaming the streets. For that brief time, the image seemed to be everywhere, ceaselessly watching the city.

A huge flag backs the show stage at the Pacific Auction Gallery. Auctioneer Douglas X was busy liquidating an estate sale windfall. "Were in the same family for 56 years," he said of two hardwood end tables. "And if they weren't split up in 56 years, we aren't gonna do it now. Gotta buy the pair." Batches of bored buyers in the bidding pit raised their numbers with practiced halfheartedness. "Don't want to seem too eager," said auction assistant Carol X.

Mulholland Drive winds along the spine of the Santa Monica Mountains. The drive is named after William Mulholland, who began life as a ditch tender and became L.A.'s ultimate water visionary and pirate. I walked the edge of the road, looking over high fences onto private streets and swimming pools of unearthly blue. As the convertibles passed, I held the camera over my head and spun in an arc, shooting blindly. The drivers stared into their rearview mirrors as if I were an apparition.

"People say skateboarders are losers," said William X, "but I graduated high school with a 3.12 average and manage a Round Table Pizza with $1,300 a night in the till."

The January storm was blowing in off the ocean but a tough handful braved the beach. Brian X, skimboarder, said "Hope it doesn't rain too soon." Scot X, who works in publicity for A&M records, but who is really a drummer said "Send me a photograph," which I did. Louie X, a volleyball regular, said, "Way cool," after every nice play by the opposing side. When someone poked a large and very strange looking lump on his sun-blasted back, he said, "Probably cancer," and I thought to myself, could be.

Children at play around a war memorial near the Harbor View Memorial Cemetery. A plaque on the reverse identifies the object as a 16 inch projectile of the type fired from Babette guns of the Third Coast Artillery in April of 1944.

The 14-year-old had stopped flopping in pain by the time I arrived at the intersection of Clarenden Avenue and Marconi Street. The paramedics had cut off his clothes. There was a small pile: pants, flannel shirt, blood-covered socks, and pristine white Nike Air hightops with oversized loopy black laces. One shoe had a clean bullet hole in it. I stood around just behind the police lines with some of the neighborhood kids. One of them told me his 25mm pistol had been taken away by his mother. A second claimed to have seen the shooter. Another offered to show me the severed halves of a cat they had thrown under a train the previous day.

Ingenious and complex walls of three-quarter inch plexiglass shield the shopkeepers in large parts of Los Angeles from their customers while still allowing the exchange of money and merchandise through twisting slots, sliding trays, and closable windows. In a small store on Atlantic Avenue, I raised my camera to the plex wall and shot past the guns. The shopkeeper moved off into the shadows.

Fernando X was 19 when his older brother was pulled over on a suspected DUI traffic stop and beaten to death by Los Angeles County Sheriffs. He heard the two officers involved are now in law enforcement in Texas. Against his mother's wishes, he himself went to the L.A. County Sheriff's Academy and now works as a fire paramedic. He and his wife have transformed their house into a five bedroom, two story structure with a sunken office and two jacuzzi tubs, but his dream is to move to the nearly all white south Orange County community of Laguna Niguel.

It was a simple, pure moment. In the quick flow and flash of a swap meet entrance, the girl holding her brother paused for the briefest instant before moving off into the crowd.

Bogart, Brando, Hepburn, Gable, James Dean. At a little shop a couple blocks down from Media City Center and a few miles due north of the Disney Studios and the old Warner Brothers lot, $150 will buy you a plaster mask of a dead Hollywood star. The display seemed to draw a crowd, but I didn't see any buyers.

Tucson X got involved in a street basketball game, leaving his homeboys to watch Tyler, age two. She seemed emotionally needy, seeking attention from one bystander after another. The homeboys surreptitiously smoked pot and talked about the strengths of the John Marshall High basketball team.

On the night of the L.A. riots Elliot X became so disturbed that he drove directly to lax and flew to Washington d.c. to escape the city. I walked with him on streets with burnt-out empty pads while he waited for his car to be repaired. He became highly agitated as he spoke of the riots. "This was a bad area," he said. "Looting and fires, especially the Fedco right over there."

Born with defective maculas, Ed X has been legally blind since birth. Despite this condition, or perhaps because of it, he became an engineer specializing in forward-looking infrared sensing-systems which see into utter darkness by detecting heat signatures.

There is a ghost neighborhood right off the end of the main runway at LAX. The houses were uprooted and moved away, leaving disintegrating streets and a handful of tough surviving ornamental plants beneath the periodic roar of the jets. At dusk, up on the summit of Sandpiper Street, I encountered David X, a pro who shoots stock images for Tony Stone International. He had his Nikon and rented 800mm lens all set up and he was waiting for the perfect light and the perfect moment for the perfect shot of a 747 climbing past the new control tower. I looked through the lens and agreed it could be a saleable photograph, but if you ever visit the top of Sandpiper Street, this is what the place really looks like.

I came off the porch of Slim Walker, a very old former Lassen County sheriff who lives on social security ("Put a bullet through the jacket of one of Harry Bridges' boys, come up to organize a commie union.") and met Albert, Saul, and David leaving the school playground across the street. "We're just out playing."

Anthony X preaching Christ at the corner of Soto Street and Brooklyn Avenue. For a time, Brooklyn Avenue was closed to allow filming of a tow truck crash for "Undercurrent," a Mexican Mafia movie. When the work wrapped up and the group of locals who had worked as extras were paid and released, Anthony was briefly enveloped in a moving crowd of potential converts. Despite his efforts and his bullhorn, they dispersed into the neighborhood.

"Mmmmm. Hello and welcome to the one and only 24 hour pleasure party," says the sultry woman. At a bank of pay phones in front of the corner store, five children used a stolen phone card to call 1-900-STRIPPERS. "I know you've never called anything like this before, so hang on and I'll show you how it's done, baby." The children took turns on the line and some moaned and panted in imitation. The oldest boy walked across the littered grass and punched a tree.

Two girls came over to explain why New Avenue at the San Bernardino Freeway is covered in graffiti—the signs, the walls, the embankments. Simple, they said. The freeway is a gang boundary. "Whenever we go over there, they always ask us, 'are you in the Lomas gang?'"

As it turned out, I was virtually at the earthquake epicenter when I shot this photograph looking into a ground surface marked with cryptic signs of subterranean features. Less than twelve hours later, at 4:31 in the morning on January 17, 1994, a blind thrust fault, now called the Northridge fault, gave way 18.4 kilometers below the surface, collapsing freeways, offices, houses, and apartment buildings.

There is pornography everywhere in Los Angeles—drifted loose on the hillsides and ravines, in trash heaps and side yards, discarded in industrial parks and alleyways. This piece is typical, found by the side of the road in the company of three beer cans, a peppermint schnapps bottle, and a small clump of neglected trees. Aloft in the dried mustard stems, the light breeze twitched it back and forth and from somewhere in the houses below a young girl cried: "Open the door. Let me in. Open the door."

I slipped into the guarded, gated community on the Palos Verdes Peninsula by hiking up a wooded ravine and ascending a horse trail. For a time on the private streets, the only sounds were of birds and the distant hum of muffled pool pumps. I passed a woman coaching a girl on a small bicycle with training wheels. The street ended at long gated drives flagged with signs warning of armed response. "There comes that man again," said the child as I returned, and the mother hustled her out of sight along a curved driveway. As I photographed trees and clouds reflected in a car, a woman with a small dog on a short leash gave me a wide berth.

I picked up the Union Pacific railway line near Tobias Avenue and walked east across the San Gabriel River, running murky with the sediment it's been dumping into the L.A. basin for 16 million years. On the railroad bridge over the 605 Freeway, taggers had filigreed the riveted steel panels with indecipherable interlocking letters, leaving no surface without adornment.

I blasted north at eighty on the Glendale Freeway, slicing into the hills close by the site of Edward Weston's original little honeysuckle-covered photo studio. As I approached the Ventura Freeway interchange flyovers, I entered square Z80 and held my camera far out the window and shot. The wind buffeted and tore, and I wondered how long the camera would skitter and skid along the concrete if I lost my grip.

Ken X let me feel the plastic shunt that emerges from his braincase below the left ear and runs down the side of his neck. I pushed it back and forth and it felt like a small, hard parasite just beneath the skin. Ken was waiting for Noreen X, his girlfriend of twelve years to be brought home by her parents. He told me he works part time pushing orders and pulling drinks at Taco Bell and cleaning up the messes left by students from Covina High. He spoke of his dream of besting his all-time bowling score of 243.

The summer sun bakes the tar out of the levee top where the Los Angeles River passes the Windmill Creek Apartments. I took this photograph and then walked with this man all the way to the Long Beach Boulevard bridge. He reluctantly told me he walked this exercise route every day, but he would not tell me his name. Finally, he admitted the police had warned him not to speak with anyone.

Sawcuts at center court laid open the guts of the mall right down to the piping. By chance, the first person up the escalator was assistant mall marketing director Carolyn X out checking on her frequent shopper program. "I have to warn you: mall security may stop you. We don't allow pictures unless you've been cleared at the mall office." Later, a mall patrol officer said surveillance and control had just been tightened up. "We've had intermittent trouble with gangbangers, especially on the weekends." He mentioned the recent running gun battle in the nearby West Covina mall.

Levonne and Walter X pose for photographs at their wedding reception in what one neighbor described as "the richest black neighborhood in America." Levonne, daughter of a minister, arrived in a Rolls Royce. I saw one white among the 230 invited guests.

Victor X makes a living exporting American castoffs to Central America. I stood with wives and families as he and two associates pulled out into a thin and vaguely ominous drizzle. They were driving or towing five Toyota trucks and a small boat, all filled with used stereos, tools, and TVs under taut tarps. With luck, he said, the trip down would take eight or nine days east to Texas, south the length of Mexico, and across Guatemala into Honduras, where the partners sell everything right down to the bumper hitches. The biggest business expense is the mordida, the bite, required at the Federale checkpoints down through Mexico. When dusk arrives, the caravan stops. "People who drive after dark end up dead," said Victor. "They put babies out in the road," said a wife, "Then when the trucks stop..." She paused and made vicious slashing motions with her arm.

I climbed over the railing above Pacific Coast Highway in Santa Monica to look at the erosion eating away the city. The cracked asphalt of what had been a walking path appeared solid enough to closely approach the edge. A man walked to the railing. He stood there, calm and luminous and his eyes like mine were drawn to the chasm. His gaze never wavered as I raised my camera.

For the six or more hours I spent at the Alameda Market, Maria and her husband came and went collecting cans and bottles. Just down the open corridor from their two small wheeled carts, I talked for hours with Frederico who was selling videos on how to learn English and I watched Maria return periodically to pack her small finds meticulously in the carts before again striking out into the maze of the market. Eventually, out of curiosity she approached Frederico and I and a complex translated conversation ensued. Maria and her husband Jose live on his farmworker's pension of just over $500 a month. The two carts of bottles and cans, perhaps five or six dollars worth Maria estimated, were "for donation to the church, for the poor." They refused my offer of a small bill until I explained through Frederico that it, too, was for the church.

Every year, the owners of an extermination company throw a $3,000 birthday party for their two sons and 150 friends. As the evening came on, the children beat hanging pinatas with baseball bats. A girl carrying her cup of candy ran across the open grass, and I felt the spirit of Diane Arbus pass among the deepening shadows.

The painter's ocean view house at 20670 Rockpoint Road burned in the Malibu fires of November 3, 1993, incinerating much of his life's work. The painter agonized for more than a year and finally, unable to bear the thought of moving back, put the burned off pad up for sale. Unknowing, Bobbi X walks the property with the intention of buying and building. Bobbi is an interior decorator who is now working on a casino interior in Las Vegas. Her husband designs motorcycles for Honda. "We could put the pool right here."

Diagonal paths slice down the bluffs to Dockweiler State Beach. I shot the volleyball player then walked out to the slurry pipeline pumping away the sand which persistently clogs the harbor mouth at Marina Del Rey. A typical five foot section of shorewash displayed the following items: a bottle cap, a clear flexible straw, a small ziploc bag, a Hostess choco-diles wrapper, the handle of plastic fork, a red straw, a film can cap, a piece of bubble wrap, four unidentifiable pieces of plastic, and a cigarette butt.

Raped at age three by a cousin, Ruby X was told she could never have children. When she became pregnant at age 18, she regarded her son Marvin as her "miracle child." She and Marvin live together in a small infill development built along a powerline easement in the south central Los Angeles community of Southgate.

For seven months, Robert X lived comfortably under the carob trees on the 405 freeway embankment. "Yesterday, this guy wanted to cook up and I wouldn't let him. He said, 'Fuck you. You just served your own eviction notice.'" A Caltrans crew came and threw Robert out the morning I was there. He pulled a sodden X-ray from his fourth shopping cart load. "I was rolled for eighty bucks and the guy broke my jaw and my finger. Sometimes it gets so hard to live that it's a wonder a guy can go on."

Yitzhak X, Auschwitz survivor, sells his belongings at a yard sale following the death of his wife and the condemnation of his earthquake-damaged Colbath Avenue apartment.

A handful of mansions have been built on a short, newly paved portion of the old Skyline Fire Road which cuts through Union Oil leases along the crest of La Habra Heights. I slipped through the damaged main gate and walked the hill above the houses. There were four inactive oil pumps, three dumped air conditioners, a windblown scatter of bills, numerous beer cases, an ironing board, and a single tennis shoe.

Beth X does a walk-through in the two bedroom home she and her husband just purchased for $649,000. After they left, real estate agent Steve X looked at me and said, "We're taking back-up offers. Always do until the deal closes."

Mark X has been in and out of mental institutions his entire life. "I feel bad. Why can't they do something? Maybe they can change my medication." He sits here on the steps of his current board and care facility near the docks in San Pedro. His previous roommate jumped from their second floor window and was transferred elsewhere.

Brian X works as a Hollywood electronic special effects man, but his real dream is to produce pornography. I met him taking in the view toward Long Beach from among the idled pumps of the old Signal Hill oil field. He has done two films so far: Dreamscapes and Turnabout. Despite the "big name talent" in Dreamscapes—Channone, Rayveness, Amber Woods, Red Boan, and Michael J. Cox—a crooked distributor left Brian with an $8,500 loss and a porch full of 400 returned tapes. Undaunted, he has high hopes for his newest venture. He paid a Hungarian porno actress and an actor $100 each and got behind the camera himself for Porno 101. It's a self-instruction tape on how to shoot your own porno movie, and he plans to self-distribute over the internet.

The man had spent six weeks with an icepick, he said, establishing a small beachhead in his weed-infested lawn. The four children he raised in the house of 33 years were all gone, and the neighbors were all changing. He gestured at the house next door: "Well, they got kind of old. He died. She's still alive, I think." I forgot to write the man's name among my notes, so I determined to return when I again had a square nearby. When I knocked on the door close to five years later, no one was home. Photograph in hand, I went next door. Yes, said the new neighbor, the man still lived there, but, no, he didn't know the man's name.

Del X points out the photograph of her husband (on the shelf next to the white vase). She told me she has read everything ever written by Masters and Johnson, "even the really technical stuff." An ant crawled unnoticed on her face as we spoke.

Pam X works the phone tossing out dream possibilities to a reno customer. She previously had her own kitchen design and contracting business, but the recession forced her into selling prefab kitchens at Home Depot.

Janet X, real estate agent, looked at me with undisguised suspicion as I took photographs of the pool tucked against the Verdugo Hills cutslope. She peered at me through the vertical blinds, moving away only when I came back into the spare purity of the unfurnished kitchen. The three-bedroom house was listed for $465,000, and there were no serious buyers. "Last year was terrible," said Janet.

Richard X and his brother's girlfriend Brenda relax on a Sunday afternoon. Richard, unemployed since he was brain-damaged in a bicycle accident in 1987, described how he struggled to the hallway door during the Northridge earthquake and watched the refrigerator walk across the kitchen and smash into the wall. Brenda sought my professional advice concerning a small flash unit.

Across Wilmington Avenue from the big Arco refinery, Bernice X works weekends and evenings behind the counter. She poured coffee for the regulars like Greg X and listened in as Greg and I talked. Greg came out from Indianapolis in '89 trying to get away from the drugs and booze. He had a railyard job with his brother until the layoffs of '92 and now is a non-union trucker driving loads of meat around L.A. at night to avoid the traffic. Bernice said she has two jobs: waitressing and a lumber wholesaler. "I don't like to stay home. I should have been born a man."

Shane X is Paul's Shell Service employee of the month for January 1994. The station itself is a winner of Shell's Image Award for beauty and upkeep, and now Shane's younger brother Justin has been hired to help keep the premises spotless. "It's an okay job, but I hate cleaning the restrooms."

Phillip X bought the new home at the end of a cul-de-sac four years earlier for $450,000 but guessed the real estate downturn had probably knocked eighty to one hundred thousand dollars off the value.

I watched through the lens as the woman carefully carried her shopping bags across the frame from right to left. Relative to the landscape painted on the west-facing wall, she slowly moved upriver. She turned suddenly, set down her bags on the stained sidewalk, and seemed for a brief moment ready to wade the river and stroll out among the trees and hills of the silent mural.

At the height of the holiday season, a thousand cars a night clog the Westminster Presbyterian church's annual drive-through Christmas pageant. Church members pose as all the familiar Biblical figures and the lines of cars snake out through the Pasadena neighborhood, said the pastor. As the shadows grew long and the evening onslaught threatened, touch up crews hustled to repair the sets from the effects of wind and rain.

Raul X relaxing in Point Fermin Park while two friends practice throwing an eight inch knife into the Canary Island palms. He drank beer from a paper cup and explained his intentions for a still healing diagonal scar across the top of his head. He had been hit with an unknown object during a fight at a party. "As long as I have this scar on my head, I might as well get a tattoo of a zipper — a military-style zipper with big metal teeth."

Leandra X was on the beach collecting heart-shaped rocks and drinking Seagrams Wild Berries wine coolers from a stock of four packs in a plastic bag nestled against a boulder. She told me that two weeks earlier, her boyfriend of two years David "got drunk with some friends and fucked some other girl—twice. I moved out. I'm not stupid." I spent perhaps an hour helping her look for heart-shaped rocks, but never found a truly satisfactory one. Eventually, she conceded the difficulty of the search and began collecting broken heart-shaped rocks. As I left, she held up a rock and yelled, "Look, a tear-shaped rock," but I was too distant to see if it was truly tear-shaped.

Shane X, song writer and lead guitarist with the punk band Third Wheel in front of the garage where his band practices. "They can hear us at the gas station all the way up on Alondra." Space aliens dominate the walls of the garage, the band's songs, and the tattoos he designed himself.

Rocky, age seven, pretty much has the run of the Manor Stylist, the barber shop Nat has owned since 1950. "When I started," said Nat, "there were nothing but fields from here to the refinery. I had six shops and then the goddamn Beatles came along and people went years without cutting their hair. By 1970, I was down to this place."

The German Shepherd behind the low fence lunged repeatedly as I passed one of the last houses on Emma Street in the Happy Valley section of Lincoln Heights. At the corner, I turned south on Alta Street and spent some of the afternoon there sitting in the dirt and drinking beer with Maria X and Benjamin X. For the past three years, they have lived in a small camper broken down at the curbside near the high school. They showed me the jalapeño peppers they were growing around the base of the no parking sign. I honored their request not to take any photographs.

Cow number 217 escapes during the afternoon milking at the last dairy in L.A. County. Started in 1939 by Dutch immigrants, the Norwalk Dairy is down to 200 cows. It's hemmed in on all sides by development, the city has spent years trying to close it down, and the life-sized fiberglass Holstein on the roof in front gets tagged regularly. Nelson X, son of the original owners, had worked a different dairy in Chino for a time, but said he was back at the family business "until the end."

Marta X, Miller Girl of the month, signs posters at a Savon Pharmacy grand opening. For men, she generally signed the breasts. For young people or women, she tended to sign the midriff. "Do you have one of yourself?" a man asked. The question was asked repeatedly by the predominately Latino customers. At first she admitted they had not printed a poster of her. Before I left she began saying she was out of all posters but the blonde woman.

Somebody had scratched out Snoop Doggy Dog's eyes. "What? You think Snoop Dog's dope?" said a woman boarding a bus. I talked a while with John X, who was working on plans to get out of L.A. He said people make their own path and launched into a rambling explication which ranged from Lincoln freeing the slaves to the CIA introducing crack to south central L.A. "When was Lincoln, anyway?" asked John. "The 1300s? Maybe the 1400s?" "Yes," I said agreeably, "maybe the 1400s."

"I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't like it. I take my truck home every night. Every night. Now I've just got to finish up a shower valve. Cut away the tile, fix the valve, and put this plate over it."

When Rudolpho saw my camera, he hauled me into his restaurant and posed in front of a mural of his family. He is the son of Pedro Infante, one of the great movie idols of Mexico. I made the mistake of professing ignorance and Rudolpho became slightly indignant: "Just say the name Infante and everyone will know." He was right: an internet search turned up 343,950 references to Pedro Infante. I read of his "trilogy of bittersweet sorrow," his multiple wives and mistresses, his belief in the sexually stimulating properties of cognac, his death piloting a converted cargo plane on April 15, 1957, and the rumors he was not killed, but that his handsome face was terribly disfigured and he went into hiding.

Carlos X sells his household possessions in order to buy food for his wife and two-year-old twins. He had spent two weeks in the hospital with kidney stones and had therefore lost his job as a tree trimmer. I bought the frame for five dollars. It now hangs in my hallway, enclosing a photograph taken by my brother during our climb of a high peak in the Canadian rockies.

While I was shooting the small oval painting, Franca X and her husband were beginning the fight which would lead to her suicide attempt in the house visible across the street. The painting was purchased by Helen, an expatriate who hopes to sell her north Downey house and move to somewhere on a hillside with a view of the Danube. Drawn by the sirens several hours later, I took 14 frames of Franca trailing intravenous lines as she was wheeled out to the ambulance, but the photographs were unrevealing—just another domestic dispute, just another crush of emergency vehicles; just another half-hearted overdose.

Alan X rises out of the baptismal built by a converted ex-Hell's Angel from San Bernardino. A team of three stood by to swing the boom mike in to record and transcribe the prophecies, half in English, half in tongues, issued by the senior pastor. The Community Chapel World Outreach ripped out the Golden West Ballroom's famous horseshoe bar—the largest west of the Mississippi, according to one congregation member. And once the ceremonies had been held to cast out decades worth of demons, they went on to start Southern California Community Bible College. The offerings include classes in spiritual warfare, demonology, and television evangelism.

The street vendor said business was not good because no one had any money, but the conversation was short because I speak little Spanish and he little English. I bought a package of peanuts for 50 cents and walked a short block to Figueroa Street, where I stood talking to a Jehovah's Witness handing out the Watchtower. A man wheeling a lawn edger crossed Slauson toward us. "I'll kill you, motherfucker," he said as he passed. "I'll kill you." The Watchtower had an article on Hiroshima: "In a river, the soldiers trawled a fishing net from a boat and recovered more than 50 bodies every time they pulled up the net. We took the bodies ashore and stacked them in fires and burned them."

Abraham X, Mobil station auto mechanic, came to the United States from Jordan in 1973. "You aren't Jewish, are you? It doesn't matter. I have to speak frankly. The Jews-you know the word corruption? They are the corruption all over the world. The pornography, the banks, guns, everything."

Some images seem to appear on the negatives unbidden. I remember the yard sale along Victory Boulevard. I recall shooting self portraits in the round mirror. I can even bring back the prickly late July heat in the San Fernando Valley. But I have no recollection whatsoever of the strange man behind the sign offering "2 week free rent, $250 move in."

Heavy winds pushed storm clouds around above the San Fernando Valley. When the heavy drops started pelting Laurel Canyon Boulevard, Guana X and Alondra X grabbed the bags of oranges they were selling to passing traffic from the asphalt median and ran for cover. I ended up under the bus shelter at the corner of Vanownen Street where I shot this photograph.

 

 

Photo

On his days off, D’ihigi rides his horses south along the L.A. River as far as the Long Beach Boulevard bridge and beyond
Anthony X floats above his house in the late afternoon
Lucille X in front of the house her father bought in 1930
Ryan X and Joel X out vandalizing the construction equipment that was transforming the last open field in their neighborhood into a set of industrial buildings
This image of a man looking through spread fingers was posted throughout Los Angeles for a short period of time during the middle of 1995
A huge flag backs the show stage at the Pacific Auction Gallery
Mulholland Drive winds along the spine of the Santa Monica Mountains
People say skateboarders are losers
The January storm was blowing in off the ocean but a tough handful braved the beach
Children at play around a war memorial near the Harbor View Memorial Cemetery
The 14-year-old had stopped flopping in pain by the time I arrived at the intersection of Clarenden Avenue and Marconi Street
Ingenious and complex walls of three-quarter inch plexiglass shield the shopkeepers in large parts of Los Angeles
Fernando X was 19 when his older brother was pulled over on a suspected DUI traffic stop and beaten to death by Los Angeles County Sheriffs
It was a simple, pure moment
Bogart, Brando, Hepburn, Gable, James Dean
Tucson X got involved in a street basketball game, leaving his homeboys to watch Tyler, age two
On the night of the L.A. riots Elliot X became so disturbed that he drove directly to lax and flew to Washington d.c. to escape the city
Born with defective maculas, Ed X has been legally blind since birth
There is a ghost neighborhood right off the end of the main runway at LAX
I came off the porch of Slim Walker, a very old former Lassen County sheriff who lives on social security
Anthony X preaching Christ at the corner of Soto Street and Brooklyn Avenue
Mmmmm. Hello and welcome to the one and only 24 hour pleasure party
Two girls came over to explain why New Avenue at the San Bernardino Freeway is covered in graffiti
As it turned out, I was virtually at the earthquake epicenter when I shot this photograph looking into a ground surface marked with cryptic signs of subterranean features
There is pornography everywhere in Los Angeles
I slipped into the guarded, gated community on the Palos Verdes Peninsula by hiking up a wooded ravine and ascending a horse trail
I picked up the Union Pacific railway line near Tobias Avenue and walked east across the San Gabriel River
I blasted north at eighty on the Glendale Freeway,
Ken X let me feel the plastic shunt that emerges from his braincase below the left ear and runs down the side of his neck
The summer sun bakes the tar out of the levee top where the Los Angeles River passes the Windmill Creek Apartments
Sawcuts at center court laid open the guts of the mall right down to the piping
Levonne and Walter X pose for photographs at their wedding reception in what one neighbor described as "the richest black neighborhood in America."
Victor X makes a living exporting American castoffs to Central America
I climbed over the railing above Pacific Coast Highway in Santa Monica to look at the erosion eating away the city
For the six or more hours I spent at the Alameda Market, Maria and her husband came and went collecting cans and bottles
Every year, the owners of an extermination company throw a $3,000 birthday party for their two sons and 150 friends
The painter's ocean view house at 20670 Rockpoint Road burned in the Malibu fires of November 3, 1993
Diagonal paths slice down the bluffs to Dockweiler State Beach
Raped at age three by a cousin, Ruby X was told she could never have children
For seven months, Robert X lived comfortably under the carob trees on the 405 freeway embankment
Yitzhak X, Auschwitz survivor
A handful of mansions have been built on a short, newly paved portion of the old Skyline Fire Road
Beth X does a walk-through in the two bedroom home she and her husband
Mark X has been in and out of mental institutions his entire life
Brian X works as a Hollywood electronic special effects man
The man had spent six weeks with an icepick, he said, establishing a small beachhead in his weed-infested lawn
Del X points out the photograph of her husband
Pam X works the phone tossing out dream possibilities to a reno customer
Janet X, real estate agent, looked at me with undisguised suspicion as I took photographs of the pool tucked against the Verdugo Hills cutslope
Richard X and his brother's girlfriend Brenda relax on a Sunday afternoon
Across Wilmington Avenue from the big Arco refinery, Bernice X works weekends and evenings behind the counter
Shane X is Paul's Shell Service employee of the month for January 1994
Phillip X bought the new home at the end of a cul-de-sac four years earlier
I watched through the lens as the woman carefully carried her shopping bags across the frame from right to left
At the height of the holiday season, a thousand cars a night clog the Westminster Presbyterian church's annual drive-through Christmas pageant
Raul X relaxing in Point Fermin Park while two friends practice throwing an eight inch knife into the Canary Island palms
Leandra X was on the beach collecting heart-shaped rocks and drinking Seagrams Wild Berries wine coolers
Shane X, song writer and lead guitarist with the punk band Third Wheel in front of the garage where his band practices
Rocky, age seven, pretty much has the run of the Manor Stylist, the barber shop Nat has owned since 1950
The German Shepherd behind the low fence lunged repeatedly as I passed one of the last houses on Emma Street in the Happy Valley section of Lincoln Heights
Cow number 217 escapes during the afternoon milking at the last dairy in L.A. County. Started in 1939 by Dutch immigrants
Marta X, Miller Girl of the month, signs posters at a Savon Pharmacy grand opening
Somebody had scratched out Snoop Doggy Dog's eyes
I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't like it
When Rudolpho saw my camera, he hauled me into his restaurant and posed in front of a mural of his family.
Carlos X sells his household possessions in order to buy food for his wife and two-year-old twins
While I was shooting the small oval painting, Franca X and her husband were beginning the fight which would lead to her suicide attempt in the house visible across the street
Alan X rises out of the baptismal built by a converted ex-Hell's Angel from San Bernardino
The street vendor said business was not good because no one had any money, but the conversation was short because I speak little Spanish and he little English
Abraham X, Mobil station auto mechanic, came to the United States from Jordan in 1973
Some images seem to appear on the negatives unbidden
Heavy winds pushed storm clouds around above the San Fernando Valley

Photo Summary

Photographs from seven years of chance-driven journeys across Los Angeles.

Book

Off