L.A. River - Michael Kolster

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Résumé :
Photography of the Los Angeles river, attuned to a sense of the river's past and present and paying attention to the accumulation of life across it. Uses nineteenth century photographic technology.

Biographie:
Michael Kolster is a 2013 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in Photography. His work has been exhibited widely and is included in the permanent collections of numerous museums in the U.S. and Europe, including the American University of Paris, Brown University, Center for Creative Photography, George Eastman House of Film and Photography, High Museum of Art, Huntington Library, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Princeton University Art Museum, Smith College Museum of Art, and Williams College Museum of Art. His previous books, all published with George F. Thompson Publishing, are Paris Park Photographs (2022), L.A. River (2019), and Take Me to the River: Photographs of Atlantic Rivers (2016). He is currently Professor of Art at Bowdoin College, where he has taught since 2000....

Sommaire:
Three centuries ago, the Los Angeles River meandered through marshes and forests of willow and sycamore. Trout spawned in its waters, and grizzly bears roamed its shores in search of food. The river and its adjacent woodlands helped support one of the largest concentrations of indigenous peoples in North America, and it also largely determined the location of the first Spanish Pueblo and ultimately the city of Los Angeles. The river was also the city's sole source of water for more than a century before flood-control projects made the L.A. River what it is today.

Michael Kolster, in L.A. River, relies on a nineteenth-century photographic technology to render the Los Angeles River today, from its headwaters in Canoga Park and the suburbs of the San Fernando Valley to its mouth at the Pacific Ocean in Long Beach. Coincidentally, the founding of the city of Los Angeles and California's achievement of statehood in 1850 coincide historically with the invention of the wet-plate photographic process, forever linking the city and state with the centrality of photography. The moving images that define L.A. River show a feature of the city's landscape that initially attracted native peoples to its banks and gave rise to the formation of our nation's second-largest city.

Channeled in concrete during the last century to control flooding, the river was all but removed from the life of the city until the turn of the twenty-first century, when concerted efforts were made by some to peel back some of the concrete and to let nature live once again. In his photographic journey, Kolster considers both the past and present and how the accumulation of life along the river suggests a larger a role for the L.A. River in the lives of the city's inhabitants....