Surveying the Gen X landscape and the origins of geek
Lovely shots by an unidentified photographer. I wonder why no one’s standing in line for Exorcist II.
UPDATE: David Augustyn, who works in Times Square, sent in the shot below from about the same angle and same time of day, taken on April 15, 2016. The more things change… Thanks, David!
(First two images via Tumblr)
The photo is one of many taken by Matt Sweeney between 1979 and 1983. Says Sweeney at The Atlantic:
I went to Hollywood to ‘make it’, but didn’t, and ended up taking pictures of Hollywood, capturing scenes of others ‘not making it’ as well. It didn’t escape me then and it doesn’t now.
That Universal Studios billboard brings back some memories. There was never a Buck Rogers attraction, but you could tour the set and sit in the cockpit of a Starfighter.
See more at the Billings Gazette. I totally forgot about the CB radio craze from about 1975 to 1981, although I loved Smokey and the Bandit and The Dukes of Hazzard. The Wikipedia article doesn’t mention it, but Glen A. Larson’s B.J. and the Bear was another popular series spotlighting the CB.
Photos from the San Francisco Chronicle‘s ubiquitous Gary Fong showing the experimental, six-sided Atari Theatre Kiosk at the BART station on Powell Street. According to Peter Hartlaub’s Chronicle article, as well as a ’77 Vending Times article (photo below) posted by The Golden Age Arcade Historian, games included Pong, Jet Fighter, Space Race, LeMans, Trak 10, and Tank. You got 90 seconds for your quarter. Screens at the top of the kiosk displayed BART schedules and other Bay Area news.
The experiment ended in 1977. The single arcade cabinet was more cost effective, easier to repair, and easier to move/transport. Still, it’s a powerful reminder that companies like Atari used to make humdrum and stressful places more fun.
All of the photos were taken by Gary Fong as part of a 1982 fashion shoot for the San Francisco Chronicle. Peter Hartlaub resurrected them for a three-part “flashback project” at SFGate. Abraham Lincoln High School is a public school, obviously. “Local 69 Muff Dive” didn’t fly in prep land, where all the rich kids wore pink shirts with little alligators on them.
You want to know if I found all the t-shirts the kids are wearing, right? I did.
They’re getting ready to hit the gas at a motocross event in Mission Viejo, California. I would much rather watch this than the motocross.
(Photo via Calisphere)
From AMMO publishing:
One afternoon in 1975, a young photographer named Hugh Holland drove up Laurel Canyon Boulevard in Los Angeles and encountered skateboarders carving up the drainage ditches along the side of the canyon. Immediately transfixed by their grace and athleticism, he knew he had found an amazing subject. Although not a skateboarder himself, for the next three years Holland never tired of documenting skateboarders surfing the streets of Los Angeles, parts of the San Fernando Valley, Venice Beach, and as far away as San Francisco and Baja California, Mexico.
During the mid-1970s, Southern California was experiencing a serious drought, leaving an abundance of empty swimming pools available for trespassing skateboarders to practice their tricks. From these suburban backyard haunts to the asphalt streets that connected them, this was the place that created the legendary Dogtown and Z-Boys skateboarders. With their requisite bleached blonde hair, tanned bodies, tube socks and Vans, these young outsiders are masterfully captured against a sometimes harsh but always sunny Southern California landscape in LOCALS ONLY.
Holland’s skateboard photographs were first shown at M+B Gallery in Los Angeles. Following the success of the show, his work has been shown internationally and used in fashion campaigns for American Apparel.
The book is a startlingly definitive record of the dawning of a sport and a subculture that were long ago corporatized, declawed, and sanitized. The working-class kids in these photographs were so hungry for freedom and speed that it absolutely precluded them from giving a fuck about anything else.
Joel Sternfeld
California, (#4), 1977
I could tell you about suburban California in the late 1970s, but Joel Sternfeld has already done it, silently and totally.
