Negative Space

Photo: Michelle Matthews. (2014). Exhibition Hall, Pasadena, California.

I have lived in the realm of visual documentation and reflection since I picked up my father’s Nikon F2 when I was 15 and started taking photos for the school newspaper. Eventually it became a medium format Mamiya, Fuji 6” x 9”, a Toyo 4” x 5”, then a myriad of digital cameras. Now I take photos with my phone. I have an archive, a visual accumulation, a record that is buried in a hard drive, on a cloud, in negatives, in boxes. Through photography, I have documented the places I have lived and gone to school, entitled “Everyday Past 1981-2001”, for my USC Master of Fine Arts thesis. “In it I revisited the places where I lived, went to school, and played. All the days that I have lived in Los Angeles can be charted through the spaces that I have occupied, domestic and institutional. Each group of individual images is defined by street address or the name of a place.” (Matthews, 2001). I was looking and studying the built environment and how it impacted the quality of my life, although I didn’t understand it yet. 

Remember to start small. Just observe at first, don’t analyze. Use curiosity, not interrogation. Save that for later. Just as we get better mileage when we separate the creative and critical functions in our attempts to write or paint or invent, so too, we make self-awareness more palatable by holding off the impulse to be critical so that we focus initially on the desire simply to see. (Levoy, 1997, p.23)

When I moved to Chicago in 1994 after living in Los Angeles since the age of five, I noticed the empty lots in between the buildings looked like missing teeth. I replaced photographing my friends, our social activities and evenings out, with documenting the built environment. I photographed empty lots, water towers, construction sites—spaces of transition, transformation, and possibility. Empty spaces, including empty lots and empty billboards, provide me a sense of solace in the sensorial overwhelm of the city. They were a blank negative space in the built environment. Contemporary ruins. Not a business, not work, not school, not a place that one had a task that needed to be achieved, but just a place to be. A wild place, a negative space. To me, empty spaces in the urban environment are akin to, “…quiet places, ‘the think tanks of the soul.’” (Levoy, 1997, p. 20).

Driving back and forth between my High School and my parents’ home in Hawthorne, California which is largely centered around the aerospace industry, the Hawthorne Airport (eventual home of SpaceX and Tesla), and just a few miles from LAX, I noticed how the air smelled better in the hills of Beverly Glen and Bel Air. I was living between what Reyner Banham calls, “Ecology 1: Surfurbia” (Hawthorne is home of the Beach Boys) “Ecology II: Foothills, Ecology III: The Plains of Id”- vast relatively featureless flatlands of the city basin, all navigated by “Ecology IV: Autopia,” the freeway system and car culture that defines Los Angeles’s mobility. (Banham, 1971). “The Plains of Id” is the geographic psyche of Los Angeles County, described by the wandering between these dramatically different ecologies and cities (of which there are 88). And I have spent my time between, Venice, Palms, Mar Vista, Culver City, Hawthorne, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Bel Air, Silver Lake, Pasadena, and now Monrovia.

But even though it is an untrue picture on any fair assessment of the built structure and the topography of the Greater Los Angeles area, there is a certain underlying psychological truth about it — in terms of some of the most basic and unlovely but vital drives of the urban psychology of Los Angeles, the flat plains are indeed the heartlands of the city’s Id. (Banham, 1971, p. 143)

I spent a lot of time in traffic on the 405 freeway, the RTD, the Big Blue Bus on my daily 24-mile round trip commute. I would stare out the window, daydreaming, keeping my head up and walking with a don’t fuck with me attitude, trying to shield myself from the gaze of strangers. I had the “ear of the animal,” (Levoy, 1997, p. 19) always listening, always looking, writing in my journals and drawing.

 Eventually, I grew to resent the chapparal and dust colored tinge of the L.A. Basin. I wanted to experience rain, cold, and snow, and “real” weather so I transferred out of UCLA (as a history major), and to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where I had a concentration in photography, and focus solely on my visual practice. Living for three years in the different neighborhoods of Rogers Park, Ukrainian Village and Pilsen taught me about what not living in Los Angeles was like. I would run into people on the street, you could get around on the train, I loved the summer thunderstorms and humidity and quickly understood an improper outfit in the winter could kill you. For me, taking a drive on Lake Shore Drive to Evanston, was no big deal. I thought the smell of the lake was funny, (slightly sour mildewy), as I was so used to (what I thought) was refreshing salty ocean air.

I grew to notice the overwhelming disparity in the built environment, between the wealth of the Gold Coast and the Cabrini-Green projects (the towers were demolished in 2000 and 2011). I was reading the landscape through my photography and started the subconscious development of my visual vocabulary. I speak through photography and still do. “The mythologist Joseph Campell used to say that we’re having experiences all the time that hint at our hungers. He insisted that we must learn to listen for them, learn to recognize them. The great sacrilege, he said, in terms of the soul’s integrity, is that of ‘inadvertence, of not being alert, not awake.’” (Levoy, 1997, p. 21).

It was always a shock coming back home to visit and getting back on the freeway, and how fast people drove. Where was everyone going, and why so fast? I was happy to go to my parents’ house and drive to Manhattan Beach and enjoy the winter weather of our Mediterranean climate while there was some sub-zero wind chill factor back in Illinois. By leaving Los Angeles, it helped me to understand it better, and it took my leaving LA, in order to love it.

Eventually, I came to understand that our City of Angeles is a city of many cities. Because I felt I came from everywhere, I often felt I came from nowhere. Because of my photography and visual reflection, I have found much of identity through this place. I look forward to returning to the practice of reading, writing, and reflecting on my extensive visual archive in the service of my vision seed. I am a proud Angeleno, eventually baptized by kayaking in the LA River, a channelized river that was basically a drainage ditch until it became determined navigable by the Army Corps of Engineers in 2008. The Vietnamese market that I grew up going to in Hawthorne, is now a Peruvian owned Vietnamese market. Where else would you find these contractions of culture, and difference? In California, we celebrate the beauty of the geographic difference; yet as a society we seem to struggle to embrace human difference.

Yes, it's complicated and it’s why, I LOVE LA.

References

Banham, Reyner. (1971). Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. University of California Press.
Curtice, Kaitlin B. (2023). Living Resistance: An Indigenous Vision for Seeking Wholeness Every Day. Brazos Press.
Levoy, Gregg (1997). Callings: Finding and Following and Authentic Life. Three Rivers Press.
Matthews, Michelle. (1997). Abandoned Building Chicago. Unpublished.
Matthews, Michelle. (2014). Exhibition Hall in Pasadena, California. Unpublished.