Finding the Story in an Ever-Changing Landscape

Text and Photographs © Peter Bennett

For many years I led the Los Angeles River photo adventure for the Los Angeles Center of Photography (LACP). Once or twice a year, I would take a group of people to various spots along the river where we would photograph and explore. We had a great time over about a 10-hour span.

I noticed over the years that attendance started to wane. I chalked this up to the fact that the river was becoming more accessible - people were kayaking, fishing, and a long bike path had been connected so cyclists could ride up and down great lengths of the river. In other words, it wasn’t as much of an adventure anymore - there was no need to slip past barbed wire fences and security guards. Eventually, we canceled it, which wasn’t so great for my tour-leading career but was very good for the river and for all the people who visited it.

Recently, LACP asked me to lead another shortened LA River workshop. I thought was a fine idea, and we had a good number of people sign up for it. We used a few of my photos to promote it – images of herons, egrets, and other shots of the lush foliage and river life that is normally abundant along the river.

But then the rains came. They had been coming down pretty heavily for months, as most of us know, and we got a particularly torrential rainstorm a few days before the scheduled tour. However, the day of our workshop was particularly beautiful and sunny, and expectations were high for everyone.

I knew from my experience that after heavy rains, the river's flow and levels can be very strong and very high - sometimes it subsides quickly, sometimes not. So, I was unsure of what we would find, and as we nervously gathered together in a neighboring park, I told the attendees that I had no idea what we might see when we walked over to the river’s bank.

Our little group walked through the park to the river, an area in North Atwater by the pedestrian and equestrian bridge. When we got there, I was actually unprepared for what I saw. The toll the storms had taken on the foliage and the trees was way more impactful than I could have even imagined. The water level was still very high, and the flow was strong, so much so that the little islands that populate the center of the river up there were almost completely underwater. Any of the thick foliage that normally grows there had been completely washed away. The willow trees that grow parallel to the banks were there, but looked lonely and fragile as they stuck out of the water - all lower branches were completely stripped of their leaves.

I was almost apologetic to everyone. I could see the disappointment on their faces as we all tried to recalculate what this day was going to look like. I almost immediately launched into a description of what it’s usually like, which seemed to make sense at the time but just made things worse, especially when I showed a few pictures on my phone of what this area normally looks like.

We started taking pictures from the upper bank and then headed to the pedestrian bridge for some overhead views of the river. But the question was, how were we going to fill the next few hours when essentially all we could do was walk along the high banks of the river looking down on the rushing brown waters, the sparse-looking trees, and no sign of bird life whatsoever?

There have been many times when I’ve headed out on a trip or an assignment with very clear expectations of what I think I’m going to see and what I hope to photograph. Sometimes it pans out the way I want, but all too often what I find when I get there is something very different than what I expected.

Interestingly, something similar happened the last time I was at this location. It was back in 2020, and I had gone down there hoping to photograph a scene along that section of the river for my upcoming book. I had a very specific idea of what I thought it would, or should, look like based on some previous visits there. Well, I learned if there’s one thing you can predict about the LA River, it is everchanging. Sure enough, when I got there, it looked nothing like I had imagined it would.

I remember feeling a bit deflated, as I walked out over the bridge and looked down at the scene below. I have photographed many stories over my career, and I know from experience that I am not there to tell the story I want to tell; I am there to tell the story that I find. And that's what I remembered as I stood there on the bridge.

At almost at that exact moment, a young girl walked out from behind some trees and started to walk across the river. Her feet were barely under the water; it almost appeared as if she was actually walking on it. How could this be?

She spent the next 15 minutes or so going back and forth, almost dancing as she went from one side to the other. I started photographing her and decided I wasn’t gonna stop until she stopped. I took maybe 50 or 60 shots, feeling the need to capture her grace and the obvious enjoyment and fun she was having.

After she left, I went down there to see what she was walking on. Turns out there was a small concrete ridge that extended the width of the river and that someone could easily walk on, but it had appeared magical from the bridge above. It ended up being one of my favorite photos of the river and took up a twopage spread in my LA River book.

Now here I was again, but instead of just me, I had a class full of students trying to figure out what to do, faced with their expectations, and the reality of the situation.

So I told them to be storytellers. No, it was not what they had hoped for, but it was a historic moment. What we were looking at was the result of more rain and storms that had hit our area for years, maybe decades, and the result was a river scenario that had not been seen for just that long. Photograph that, tell the story of the river that we see today. And that's what we did.

It can be hard to be aware of at the time, but sometimes we have opportunities to photograph bits of history, something that in ten or twenty years may be a fascinating glimpse into a special time and place.

That’s what we had on that day. We ended up having a fun time and took a bunch of photos of the river. And, just at the end of our walk, a great white egret perched itself on the Atwater Blvd. bridge, and we all got our bird photo.