The Los Angeles River, by Downtowngal 2008
A slight aside from the promised, Geraldine Moodie focussed, service here, but I thought I'd put up a little post about rivers. This is because an article about the Los Angeles River posted on the Guardian website today has grabbed my attention. I've had an interest in society's relationship with the river ever since I had the opportunity to take a trip into the mill town of Blackburn's rivers, which the town itself has largely been built over.
A common fate of UK rivers in the twentieth century was for many of them to become subterranean features, concreted over in order to regulate the flow of water and improve sanitation in urban areas that were growing rapidly. Where rivers intersect with human settlement this has often been the case, but the advent of modern building methods (read: concrete) and rational, modernist building practices consigned many a river to regimented channels and subterranean passages in the last hundred years. This is not to say they disappeared, they continue to live a breath, act as spaces of transgression, refuges of wildlife, etc and these themes have featured in recent work done about the Olympic Games sites in London.
What caught my attention today, though, was not UK waterways but the Los Angeles River. The river itself is a product of its place, reflective of the extremes of the climate and landscape of California within which it is situated. That means it floods spectacularly and then reduces to a trickle, depending upon the prevailing conditions. However, Los Angeles as a city is not an urban area that reflects its environment. It, by contrast, is regulated, regimented and orientated around the orderly, continuous production of capital (financial and cultural, if they can be separated in California).
The River, therefore, was perhaps always on borrowed time once the Americanisation of the landscape set in. After significant floods in the 1930's the river was concretised, burried in stone to provide a path of minimum resistance for the river and its potential flood waters to reach the sea in future. As such the nature of the river was burried and assimilated into the overbearing superstructure of the city itself. This process (and the regeneration noted in the Guardian) has been discussed at length in a book by Blake Gumprecht and it is well worth a look.
The photographs that exist of the river in its current state, as exampled above, illustrate a city that has overwritten its river, paradoxically consuming and undermining the very thing that meant it could exist there originally. I especially like Downtowngal's image as it resonates with the work of many North American photographers from the beginning of the twentieth century who documented the modification of the North American landscape to the ideas of urbanism and capital. These photographs, such as the work of Arthur Goss, you may remember inspire this blog and its take on photography as a medium.
I find Downtowngirl's image of the River somewhat nightmarish. The use of black and white and the fact that the River, bridge, pylons and other city structures all blend in to one creates a dramatic aesthetic but the punctum is the lack of contrast or distinction between nature and urban where the city and the river intersect. As mentioned above, this situates the image (and the event) within a large body of American photographic work that depicts the landscape being rearticulated, remade and consumed.
The are that is now New York's High Line Park. Image by Joel Sternfeld and High Line
The drive to remake the landscape of the Los Angeles River does, in some ways, reflect a newer form of consuming environments, one where beautiful, naturalised spaces are required in order for the enactment of leisure time. In short, the river, as with the High Line Park that was recently developed in New York, would become resituated within another broad set of shifts in the use of the North American urban landscape.
This all reflects the significance of rivers to society and the constantly evolving role they play within the fabric of the built up environment. As for the camera, its ability to provide a plethora of views from across places and times aids in the perception of broad trends such as those discussed above and as a result of this is an invaluable tool for considering the social dynamics of past times and our own.
And with that, normal (Geraldine Moodie based) service will resume next week!
