Downtown’s Inner Life

Where is the real Los Angeles? As the city prepares to throw open its doors for the Democratic convention next month, two photography exhibits at the Central Library offer some clues.

Conventioneers will probably spend most of their time downtown--derided as the center of our centerless city. But in Marissa Roth’s “Inside/Out” exhibit, our downtown emerges as dignified, a place with more life than emptiness and at least as much beauty as grime.

Downtown is home to some 25,000 people, a microcosm of the city’s ethnic diversity, industry and culture. Roth, born and raised in Los Angeles, began hanging around downtown as a child at her father’s business. The library commissioned her to record life in downtown as part of an ongoing project to document the city’s many neighborhoods.

What lingers longest in this collection is the sense of grace, serenity and light, qualities so easily obscured by the concrete office towers and busy streets.

Graceful Filipino girls hunt for Easter eggs in Elysian Park, their chiffon party dresses billowing around them. Serenity--or is it sadness?--bathes the face of a 10-year-old girl nestled under a shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe in her family’s apartment at Olive Street and Pico Boulevard. The light falling on rows of cars in an underground parking garage takes on an ethereal, if not heavenly, quality.

So does the sunlight breaking through the blue dawn over the downtown skyline on New Year’s Day, a majestic color print by Ted Soqui in a smallish collection titled “Transition, L.A. Moments Between Millenniums.” Ten local photographers fanned out across the city on New Year’s Eve, intent on capturing “ordinary Angelenos as the new millennium descended.” The collection tells a story of “celebration and reflection” that lingers after the revelry.

That celebration and that reflection are evident in the faces of the Lopez family of Pico-Union. They sat for their portrait by Gilles Mingaffon in front of crucifixes and devotional candles festooned with party streamers. After decades of laboring as a janitor and gardener so his children could have a better life, Don Rafael Lopez is celebrating what may be his last year in Los Angeles before retiring to his native Oaxaca, Mexico. His is the face of hard work and dreams accomplished.

Good photography lets us see the obvious in a new way. These two exhibits, as much a gift to ourselves as our convention guests, remind us how much lies beneath the surface.