ABSTRACT
On research trips I photographed glossies of silent stars in old scrapbooks and shot still frames of feature film wound on Steenbecks. Seldom did I capture family and friends during sunny “Kodak moments.” When my husband, Bob, flew out to join me in LA one summer, he was the one who photographed my parents in their colorful backyard. Stalks of orange and purple bird-ofparadise looked plastic to the eye. Plants of every species covered the ground and clambered up fences to filter the southern California light. Cacti with needled and succulent branches pierced the cloudless sky. A panoply of trees yielded apples, oranges, lemons, grapefruit, peaches, apricots, figs, persimmons, and avocados. Behind burglar bars, my mother disciplined nature indoors in serene floral arrangements-a touch of zen in a district we dubbed Fort Crenshaw after the Rodney King verdict. At the Kokusai, a nearby movie theater that used to show Japanese melodramas and samurai swashbucklers, pentecostal singing resonated. Japanese American merchants had been closing their shops and leaving the neighborhood as blacks moved in. Several blocks away, Martin Luther King, Jr., stared from a billboard that proclaimed, “The Promised Land is found in Financial Independence.” Beneath his gaze, Latino vendors sold floral bouquets and bags of oranges to drivers waiting on the Santa Monica freeway ramp.
