دانلود کتاب Los Angeles, an Illustrated History

Los Angeles: An Illustrated History is an attempt to get all the people who have ever made up the city of Los Angeles to sit still long enough for a group portrait. It has not been easy and at first might be thought more than slightly chimerical in nature.

The problems have been more than just finding a mutually convenient day for a sitting. Los Angeles was founded in 1781, alas photography was not invented until the early part of the nineteenth century. Even after invention, photography was an unwieldy technology and by the time it had been simplified enough to travel from its points of origin in Europe west to America and thence further west to Southern California, a good deal of Los Angeles life had passed from the current into the realm of history.

It is not certain which is absolutely the earliest photographic image of Los Angeles. The first date from the early 1860s in spite of a well-known and much-reproduced image of the Los Angeles plaza which repeatedly has been called the earliest photograph and dated to the 1850s (it appears on page 34). Unfortunately, it shows a structure which was not built until the early 1860s and therefore certainly has been mislabeled.

By the 1860s, cameras were here and photographers were using them to record the life of the frontier city of Los Angeles. Yet a further technological problem clouds our appreciation of the life of those days. The photographs of the 1860s, 1870s and even into the 1890s are mostly of serene cityscapes and landscapes, showing motionless or at least very slowly moving things and people. Inanimate objects, empty or nearly empty streets (the few people visible, as often as not, stare hypnotically into the camera), studio portraits of residents in their Sunday best, abound.

Of city life—teeming streets, busy markets, blacksmith stalls, courtrooms, jails, offices—we have little. The reason was, simply, that neither the cameras nor the photographic films of the day were sufficiently fast to capture life as it passed. Things had to be made to stop or at least slow down for the camera. Streets were photographed when people weren't around to cause blurrs. A charming example of this is the photograph of the family Lugo on page 29 where the adults stand rock-like but the baby couldn't be coaxed to remain still.

That early photography worked to eliminate people from their cities is a special handicap for this book. Photographs of streets and buildings are interesting and important, especially in documenting physical growth, and Los Angeles, among the world's cities, has had spectacular physical growth. But the essence of this city is, as Louis Mumford has pointed out, as a container for people's activities. And it is the detail of these activities that this book has tried to capture for Los Angeles.

Once cameras acquired rapid shutters, once films were fast enough to free the photographer from the maddening task of trying to get his subjects, and any interlopers in the background, to stand perfectly still, the record of the life of Los Angeles becomes considerably richer. Still, large parts, whole sections of our projected group portrait will be found to be missing.

In relative terms, photographs cost considerably more then than they do now. So they were taken by the rich or by those whose purpose was to capture images people elsewhere might order or tourists might buy as souvenirs. So a great many of our palm trees are preserved for immortality, but much of Los Angeles' social life and, most important, its ethnic groups, are not.

Photographs were ordered by families to record certain high-points in the rhythm of life. Ironically, sadly, many of these have not survived. They were put away, forgotten, inadvertently destroyed, left behind. Moreover, families tend to feel somebody will always be around who knows exactly who the faded face in the photograph is and what the circumstances were which dictated the making of the image, as in the photograph of (as inscribed on the back of the original) "Uncle Erreld in his Maori costume." It will be difficult, I suspect, to ever place Uncle Erreld in his proper place in our great Los Angeles group portrait.

Even when a photograph carries specific information, it can't always be trusted. Lynchings were once a frequent occurrence in Los Angeles yet few photographs survive to show us this fact of early life. One, in a major collection, clearly shows a lynching and has been identified as Los Angeles by some who should know better. It is in fact an errant motion picture still. Another, reproduced here, is a real lynching but evidence, chiefly the trees, make it highly unlikely as Los Angeles. Or, a favorite of mine, a real photograph of the famous 1910 Dominguez Hills air meet, shows a cavalcade of majestic airships cruising past the packed grandstand. Each of these devices did fly at Dominguez. Unfortunately not all at once. The photograph is a composite, a trick of the laboratory.

So photographs aren't always what they say they are. Neither are all the details of past life preserved in photographs: consider how much has missed the camera's eye! We are confronting a jigsaw puzzle then, one which comes boxed with no picture of what when assembled it is to be. History from documents and records provides an outline. The colors, the texture of life as lived in Los Angeles is missing. What follows is an attempt to supply that life, suggest the colors.

Old photographs are not just antiques, nor just quaint reminders. These pieces of information are the foundation upon which the future, whether we realize it or not, has already been placed. To ignore this information is to risk diminishing or losing altogether the diversity and vibrancy of the Los Angeles to come.