A Cultural History of California

Los Angeles after the Hippies: Photography and Media Art

Artists such as John Baldessari, Wallace Berman, Robert Heinecken and Edmund Teske had expanded photography, and a new generation of "para-photographers" continued their experiments.

First and foremost, there were Heinecken's students at UCLA, notably the class of 1971: Ellen Brooks, Michael Stone (who after graduation moved to a remote corner of the Pacific Northwest) and Robbert Flick.

Los Angeles native Ellen Brooks coined an art of "sculptural photography": "Flats" (1970), abstract photographs on artificial grass in wooden boxes, expanded to the room-sized "Lawn Couple" (1970) which affixed on a floor of artificial turf a cut-out of a life-scale photograph of a nude couple; stuffed life-size photo linens of naked bodies half buried in the sand at Venice Beach (her thesis project "Beach Piece", 1971); the three-year project "Adolescence" (1973-76) of photographs of seated adolescents printed on linen and shaped like they were seated on the floor; and carefully-arranged tableaux of miniature figures in domestic settings ("Kitchen Table", 1979).

The Dutch-born Robbert Flick focused on time instead of space: he produced a photographic documentary of the city's frenetic landscape with the multi-layered photographs of "LA Book of the Dead" (1968-71, later renamed "LA Diary"), and for three years he photographed a multi-level parking garage ("Arena" series, 1977-79). The grids of the series "Sequential Views" (1980) are made of multiple images of a landscape, taken over a period of time.

Lewis Baltz, who had graduated from Claremont Graduate School in 1971, provided objective documentary representations of mundane urban landscapes in his series of monochrome photographs such as "The New Industrial Parks near Irvine" (1974), one year before William Jenkins curated the show "New Topographics" at the International Museum of Photography in Rochester which launched that movement.

Eileen Cowin, hired by California State University at Fullerton in 1975, pioneered "mise-en-scene photography" (that blurs fiction and non-fiction) with photographs of carefully-staged tableaux, sometimes inspired by film noir, such as the series "One Night Stand" (1977-78) and "Family Docudrama" (1980-83) before turning to metaphysical themes ("Magritte with Easel", 1988).

The urban and human landscape of the metropolis was the inspiration for many photographers. James Welling (CalArts class of 1974) debuted with "Los Angeles Architecture and Portraits" (1976). Los Angeles-born John Divola (UCLA class of 1974) documented the decay of an abandoned house by the beach in the "Zuma" series (1977-78).

The self-taught Chicano photographer Luis Garza, a photojournalist for La Raza magazine since relocating from New York in 1965 (and one of the original students of the MUC program at UCLA), documented life and activism in East Los Angeles, while Los Angeles-born photographer Dennis Feldman obsessively documented ordinary lives in the poorer parts of Hollywood (collected in the book "Hollywood Boulevard 1969-1972").

Midwestern mail artist Robert Cumming turned to photography after moving to Los Angeles in 1970 ("Fast and Slow Rain", 1974).

Robert Ketchum (CalArts class of 1974), later a spokesman for the environmental movement, embraced landscape photography with two contrasting portfolios: a portfolio of small black-and-white prints, "Winters 1970-1980" (1983), made with a 35-mm camera, and the color portfolio "Order from Chaos" (1979-84) made with a large format camera.

A significant contribution to video art came from Los Angeles-born Ilene Segalove, who, while still a student at Loyola Marymount University, used an early home video recorder to shoot the video suite "The Mom Tapes" (1974–78), structured as interviews with her mother documenting their daily life togehter.

In January 1969 two members of the Black Panthers were killed on the UCLA campus by Black nationalists of another group. That event prompted a Black professor of film studies, Elyseo Taylor, to start the Media Urban Crisis (MUC) pilot program, largely shaped by his student Moctesuma Esparza. This was a multi-cultural program to train Black, Chicano, Asian-American and Native-American students and encourage them to make films in and about their ethnic communities. Moctesuma Esparza himself directed the documentary "Requiem-29" about the antiwar protest of August 1970 by Chicanos known as the "Chicano Moratorium". Another influential teacher was the Ethiopian-born Teshome Gabriel, hired at UCLA in 1974. This program, in particular, graduated a number of Black filmmakers who came to be known as the "L.A. Rebellion" movement: Ben Caldwell (class of 1976), who made the seven-minute "Medea" (1973) and was to become more famous as a community organizer; the Ethiopian-born Haile Gerima, whose master thesis was the film "Bush Mama" (1976); Charles Burnett, whose thesis was "Killer of Sheep" (1977); Larry Clark, who made "Passing Through" (1977); Jamaa Fanaka (born Walter Gordon), who made "Penitentiary" (1979), and later Billy Woodberry, whose thesis was "Bless Their Little Hearts" (1984), and Julie Dash (who enrolled in 1974 but graduated only in 1985), director of the short "Diary of an African Nun" (1977) and eventually of the first full-length film ever made by a Black woman ("Daughters of the Dust", 1991). In 1984 Ben Caldwell founded "KAOS Network", a community arts center for aspiring media artists.

Hollywood was revolutionized in the 1970s by a generation of European-style auteaurs. The "New Hollywood Movement" started suddenly in 1967 with Arthur Penn's "Bonnie And Clyde " (1967), Roman Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby" (1967), John Boorman's "Point Blank" (1967), Mike Nichols' "The Graduate" (December 1967), the quintessential film about the rebellion of youth against the traditional "American Way of Life", Stanley Kubrick's "2001 - Space Odyssey" (1968), Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch" (1969), and Sydney Pollack's "They Shoot Horses Don't They" (1969). And then it picked up speed in the 1970s with: Joseph Mankiewicz's "There Was A Crooked Man" (1970), Don Siegel's "Dirty Harry" (1971) and "Charley Varrick" (1973), Peter Bogdanovich's "The Last Picture Show " (1971), John Huston's "The Life And Times Of Judge Roy Bean" (1972), Sam Peckinpah's "The Getaway" (1972), "Pat Garret and Billy the Kid" (1973) and "Convoy" (1978), Richard Fleischer's "Soylent Green" (1973), Robert Aldrich's "Ulzana's Raid" (1972) and "Emperor of the North" (1973), Roman Polanski's "Chinatown " (1974), Robert Altman's "Nashville " (1975), Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather" (1972) and "The Conversation" (1974), Terrence Malick's "Badlands " (1973) and "Days of Heaven" (1978), Martin Scorsese's "Mean Streets " (1973), "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore" (1974) and "Taxi Driver " (1976), Brian DePalma's "Phantom Of The Paradise" (1974), John Carpenter's "Assault on Precint 13" (1976), Sidney Lumet's "Network " (1976), David Lynch's "Eraserhead" (1977), Woody Allen's "Annie Hall" (1977) and "Manhattan" (1979), Michael Cimino's "The Deer Hunter " (1978), etc.

Each of these filmmakers had a unique style and was given relative freedom by the producers. However, by the end of the 1970s films such as George Lucas' "Star Wars " (1977), Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" (1979) and Ridley Scott's "Alien" (1979) heralded a turn towards big-budget spectacles.

Michael Crichton's "Westworld" (1973) pioneered mixing computer-generated imagery and live action.

In 1979 filmmaker George Lucas hired computer scientists Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith to open a laboratory (later renamed Pixar) in San Rafael (far away from Hollywood, on the quiet sparsely populated hills north of San Francisco) devoted to computer animation with the goal of creating the first computer-animated movie.