Don Normark
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By: Chronicle Books
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 12
Average rating: 5.0 of 5
California noir 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 14 people found this review helpful.
Nestled in the hills between downtown Los Angeles and Pasadena is Chávez Ravine, site of Dodger Stadium and its acres of parking lots. Few baseball fans here could tell you that long before the Dodgers left Brooklyn, Chávez Ravine was the home of three communities of Mexican-American laborers and their families. Don Normark, a young photographer in 1948, was climbing in the hills looking for postcard-shot views of LA when he discovered La Loma, Palo Verde, and Bishop. Each neighborhood was a rambling cluster of buildings, dirt streets, and footpaths. The wooded slopes of Elysian Park overlooked the ravine, and beyond were the peaks of the San Gabriel Mountains. He felt he had found another world -- a kind of Shangri-La. For many months, he returned to take pictures of what he saw and of the people he met there. He didn't know that he was recording on film the daily life of a place and its people that was about to disappear.
The pictures, of course, are black and white, a rich range of gray tones and contrasts under the cloudless southern California sky. In a casual street scene, two men stand talking on the hard dirt, and a third, his back to them, leans across a low concrete wall. All is in sharp focus from the dusty tire track in the foreground to the pointed tower of City Hall nudging up over a darkly wooded ridge in the distance. The mid-afternoon light reflects brightly off one man's tee shirt and from the front of a small white house farther on. Meanwhile, the shadows cast by eaves, palm fronds, parked cars, and the men themselves are deeply dark.
There are many pictures of people, of all ages. Some look into the camera. Most are busy working, walking, talking, playing. A young girl wears her confirmation dress. A boy watches his father repair a car. Two men spar under branches thick with bougainvillea blossoms. An iceman stands in an open gateway, tongs slung over one shoulder. A young woman arranges flowers on an altar. A workman returns home along a winding footpath at the end of the day (see book jacket above).
Fifty years later, Normark gathered together his pictures and began looking for the people who had once lived in Chávez Ravine. This book is an album of those pictures, with commentary by the people he found, in their own words. Normark writes simply and clearly about himself and his experiences. Like his photographs, his writing style is sharply focused. In the opening pages of the book, he describes the forced relocation of the people of Chávez Ravine during the Fifties, and the various public and private interests contending for control of its development. Normark's book is both handsome and beautifully written, a fine example of text and image illuminating each other.
Editorial Review:
In 1949, photographer Don Normark walked up into the hills of Los Angeles, looking for ?a good view. Instead, he found Chávez Ravine, a ramshackle Mexican-American ?neighborhood tucked away in Elysian Park like a "poor man's Shangri-la." Enchanted, he ?stayed for a year in this uniquely intact rural community on the city's outskirts. There, ?Normark photographed a life that, though bowed down by poverty, was lived fully, ?openly, and joyfully. That ended in 1950, when the residents of Chávez Ravine were ?forced to abandon their homes to make way for Dodger Stadium. The past 50 years have ?not erased the memories of the uprooted descendants of Chávez Ravine. This haunting ?book captures their images, their stories, and their bittersweet memories, reclaiming and ?celebrating this lost village from a simpler time.
