April 12th, 2019 : Inland Empire

[xoxoxoBruce]

I’ve been to California a few times, and like everyone else been exposed to a lot of CA culture on the Tube and internet.
But I’m still a right coaster so for familiar names I only have vague impressions of where it is and what it’s claim to fame is.
The Inland Empire is one, Southern CA, and agriculture are all it sparks in my memory bank.
Well, more like a Mason Jar than a bank though.

California’s overlooked Inland Empire is the subject of an ambitious new exhibition called “In the Sunshine of Neglect: Defining Photographs and Radical Experiments in Inland Southern California, 1950 to the Present.”

Now home to 4.5 million people, the Inland Empire is 27,000 square miles of sun-baked desert extending east-west along Route 10 from Pomona to just beyond Palm Springs, and north-south along Route 15 from Victorville to Temecula.

The area is an archetype of post-war suburbanization, and all of its social, economic and environmental implications. McCulloh observes that unlike Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, the Inland Empire lacks any visual icons beyond the interchangeable tract houses of its endless developments. “The place can feel rootless and provisional, even for people who grow up there,” he says. That culture, combined with the forbidding, disaster-prone landscape of “fault lines, fire zones, and flood plains” makes for what McCulloh calls “an experimental tabula rasa playground for photographers, where nothing was at stake, so everything was possible.”

We Americans live in a democratic society and we’re equal opportunity abusers of the Earth and it’s resources.
Think Mother Nature in handcuffs and a ball gag.

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