2007. Vernon, CA.
That's downtown LA in the background. My brother Tom was nice enough to drive me out to a site I was photographing for my one and only photo job. A college friend working as a professor's assistant in New York suggested my name when the professor needed photos of a few sites in LA for his new book.
It was fun to track down the sites and sleuth around for good angles. For the site in Vernon, I ended up climbing up a tippy stack of wooden flats so I could get a good angle. There were bees living in the crates. Even my memories of the place--a large parking lot, scattered with trucks--are in black and white. Ugly industrial buildings on lumpy pieces of land, bulging asphalt smeared over unused railroad tracks; Vernon seems like something that should have been left to rust long ago. Instead, it's part of the ever-more-heavily used port and distribution center of Los Angeles and Long Beach ports. The grit keeps layering on, and the sky gets paler with the years.
After I finished taking photos, Tom and I walked around a bit, exploring. I had some film left in my camera (still a few months before my trusty cannon rebel 2000 quit for good), so I had Tom think of a story, then tell it to me as we walked across a bridge over one of the trickle-sized "rivers" of LA. I took pictures as we walked and he talked. He's very expressive with his hands, but I liked this photo better than a close up of his gesturing. The tee shirt doesn't describe Tom so much as it sums up an inherent part of his beliefs and goals. He's a great guy, a great brother.
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