HIGH LIFE TO RUINATION: SoCal Photographers Cover It All

BY COLIN WESTERBECK

Opposite: Home, from Cherry Hill, ©Jona Frank.

Jona Frank’s new book, Cherry Hill, came out this spring almost simultaneously, but coincidentally, at the same time as another book, Terminus, by another SoCal photographer, John Divola. The coincidence is as fortunate as it is fortuitous because their subjects and approaches could not be more different. Even the geography in which they worked is far-flung, with Frank’s attention focused nearby on a Santa Monica lifestyle, while Divola’s ranges northeast to an abandoned military base in Victorville, CA. Though Divola’s is the more esoteric work, each photographer is at the top of his/her game.

In Frank’s Cherry Hill (above) the photographs are heartfelt but amusing. They could be straight out of a soap opera, if the episodes were soulful rather than facetious. What she has created is more of a sitcom. Movie actress Laura Dern plays a mom who is raising a daughter in a vintage Santa Monica home. We see the tussle between mother and daughter as the latter progresses from a bawling infant to an obstreperous 23 year old. Along the way, she assumes, naturally, that she’s much smarter, better, etc., than her mom. Dern sets the pace for the mutual frustration between mother and child as the daughter grows up.

Above: from Terminus page 23, © John Divola

John Divola’s Terminus is a book larger in format than Frank’s but with far fewer pages. All these photographs were, like the one above, made in abandoned houses on the closed George Air Force Base in Victorville. All were, Divola tells us, “exposed as b&w negatives in 2016.” Each looks down a narrow hallway toward a wall on which Divola has spray-painted a black, sometimes mishappen circle. The deterioration that the hallways reveal is pitted against the indeterminant abstraction of the black circles. Little by little the camera advances down these halls until the image becomes just a vertical, black space—an inescapable end point.