January 2022 - Photobook Release of Beach Boulevard
So, after 2 years of toil, of editing image sequences, of research, of looking for paper types and publishers, my photo-research-essay project Beach Boulevard has finally emerged in physical form.
Growing up in the American Midwest, I always wanted to move to California – to live in a place quite foreign compared to the “cow towns” and ageing industrial cities of middle America that I knew so well. After all, California was where the music studios resided and where movies were made. And, it’s where all manner of famous artists seemed to inevitably end up, from William Faulkner to Rod Serling, David Hockney, and the list goes on. Setting out with not nearly enough money and my life quite literaly in my car, I drove to Huntington Beach, California in 2019. I finally got to scratch my itch for SoCal – the place known as “Surf City,” no less.
Beach Boulevard, one dimension of the culmination of my ongoing work on this area, has just been released by independent publisher Immaterial Books. It is a journey through the sand dusted streets of Orange County. In it, the reader encounters a number of characters and places, and is introduced to the variety of the built environment. In this way, the pictures do not discriminate, and I was conscious about the photographic tendency towards typology that has been present in a variety of documentary style works, especially, I would argue, as a result of the spatial and urban constitution of the region. After all, this is where the America we know so well today – of the car, the tract home, the strip mall, the fast-food restaurant – was veritably invented.
But this book does not just consist of images I made myself,, but also those that I tirelessly collected through my research into the story of the city, all to create a comprehensive portrait of this place that, for a time, I called home.
Additionally, with the way that the sequence of pictures is presented in Beach Boulevard, I hope that one realizes that my perspective has been inspired/indebted to the works of photographers like Lewis Baltz, Anthony Hernandez, Allan Sekula, and others (these are just some of my favorites) – critical documentarians of what social theorist David Harvey has called the “golden age of post-war Capital.” However, unlike many Southern Californian photographers, who I would say tend to be in a sense, cross-sectional, I was attempting a more longitudinal investigation. Beach Boulevard is less an attempt at documentary photography in a classic sense than it is to expose the fragmentary dimension of photographs as frozen moments, to then link them to broader historical contexts (a very sociological idea, I think). In this way, the photographs do not wait for time to pass to gain their historical dimension, but they challenge the viewer to begin the process of historical reflexivity in the present.
In this way, the project is a case study in a certain kind of socio-historical imagination, and about a place that is, perhaps, less-known. While its Surf City, USA, Huntington Beach seems to have always had the reputation as a kind of unruly middle sibling to the more affluent Newport Beach to its southern border and Sprawling Los Angeles farther north. In Beach Boulevard, I wanted to identify the societal, cultural, economic, and political patterns that shape the context in which we live. But, I’ll let you tell me if I was successful, or not.
Beach Boulevard is the second release in the Immaterial Books’ “Localism” series catalogue. Immaterial Books is located in Champaign, Illinois and was founded by Philip Kalantzis-Cope.