Photo books about Los Angeles and Suburbs Los Angeles (Pasadena: affordable houses, earthquake)

[Arian de Koning]

Dear Angelino's

Please be advised that I have a serious crush on Los Angeles, I cannot help it so I give in to it.
I was wondering if there are any real good picture books available about Los Angeles, its inhabitant's and the whole atmospehere over there.

Myself, I live in The Netherlands and have never been to LA before.
It is my wish to come and visit this city and drive through the suburbs like for instance the San Fernando Valley, and/or other places.

Gotta share something with ya...
I don't know but I have this weird feeling that I once lived there.
Goofy huh..
I know it sounds strange and to be honest to you, I should not mention it.
Than again LA always will have a place in my heart and its inhabitants.

Okay enough humbug now..., do you have any suggestions ???

Kind regards,
Arian.

[fastfilm]

Let's prepare your cruising through L.A. with some reality as well as fantasies, since the hometown business of L.A., the entertainment business, already peddles the illusions. Others here will post about their areas: I'll begin with mine.

I'll start your armchair tour with my suggestion for a great picturebook, "The San Fernando Valley: America's Suburb" by Kevin Roderick, currently available online. This tome will show you how this huge suburb changed, along with L.A., over the decades. There was a lot of promise here initially, with small, affordable houses on good-sized lots to make for happy families doing outdoor sports, from horseback riding to baseball to car clubs. This often is the America others around the world sees on old TV shows. "Leave It To Beaver" (popular sitcom of the 1950's) and "The Andy Griffith Show (Mayberry small town sitcom) were shot here for their outside location shots.

The Valley always had poor urban planning in its changeover from farmsites to residential and commercial sites with little historic preservation, then lost its major employers throughout the 1980's and 90's, had a devastating earthquake in 1994 that resulted in demographics' changes from people losing their houses, and now retains vestigial populations of what it was twenty years ago, overwhelmed by a great many foreign nationals and immigrants, both legal and illegal. It's not a very American place any more for huge expanses of it, wherein you won't even see or hear any English whatsoever.

You can go to http://www.AmericasSuburb.com for the website with satellite information to the book. Here's a quote from it, about my neighbor and All-American (best of everything good here) media person/humorist Sandra Tsing Loh. It's a good snapshot of here.

Perhaps the best-known commentator on the Valley's image is Sandra Tsing Loh, writer, humorist, performance artist and mostly proud inhabitant of Van Nuys, by way of Winnetka. She once explained the nub of the problem in her monthly column about the Valley in the late Buzz magazine: "There are some L.A. addresses so unfashionable that people actually recoil in horror when you admit you live there. And of course, no basin puts people off as much as the San Fernando Valley. The feeling is absolute. The same people who'll drive from Santa Monica to Pasadena (25 miles) without blinking find lunch in Reseda (16 miles) much too far." She has also noted the Valley's evolution from a white refuge of neatly mown lawns and matching haircuts to a polyglot bazaar of world tongues and styles. In her collection of columns, Depth Takes a Holiday, Loh calls the Valley the "home of a hundred King Bear Auto Centers, a thousand Yoshinoya Beef Bowls, and ten thousand yard sales."

[Charles]

Originally Posted by Arian de Koning

Dear Angelino's

Please be advised that I have a serious crush on Los Angeles, I cannot help it so I give in to it.
I was wondering if there are any real good picture books available about Los Angeles, its inhabitant's and the whole atmospehere over there.

Myself, I live in The Netherlands and have never been to LA before.
It is my wish to come and visit this city and drive through the suburbs like for instance the San Fernando Valley, and/or other places.

Gotta share something with ya...
I don't know but I have this weird feeling that I once lived there.
Goofy huh..
I know it sounds strange and to be honest to you, I should not mention it.
Than again LA always will have a place in my heart and its inhabitants.

Okay enough humbug now..., do you have any suggestions ???

Kind regards,
Arian.

There is at least one "sticky" with photos of Los Angeles on the Los Angeles City-Data forum.

You can have fun with this:

http://catalog1.lapl.org/cgi-bin/cw_...tedTerms+31010

and this

http://digital-library.csun.edu/

and this

http://www.usc.edu/libraries/archive...otographs.html

and this

http://images.google.com/images?q=+%...&imgsz=xxlarge

[TheRealAngelion]

Above Los Angeles is perhaps the most popular and best known photo book of LA. It's by photogaphers Jack Smith and Robert Cameron. It's one of a series of photo books of cities around the world they've done.

Just go to Amazon.com and you will find a variety of photo books on LA.

[MisterMark]

I just bought this book. It's excellent.

Picturing Los Angeles

[Arian de Koning]

Thanks everyone for the time and effort to inform me.

kind regards from The Netherlands (Europe)
Arian

[the one]

"images of america: maywood" by edward h aherns
a recent book about huntington park was just published, both are LA hood bordering cities. they are immediatley southeast of down town and are embelematic of the change in LA. they used to be lily white, now they are mostly hispanic. still working class tho.

[majoun]

Alain Silver's "L.A. Noir: The City As Character" and Elizabeth Ward's "Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles" both contain photos of the L.A. that Raymond Chandler wrote about in his Philip Marlowe books - the sinister and alluring darkly and dangerously glamorous mean streets of L.A. in its midcentury golden age, from high life to low life and everything in between.