Category: desert
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The Remarkable Nature Boys of Los Angeles
A photograph taken near Palm Springs, California, depicts a long-haired, bearded man sitting on a tree stump playing slide guitar. He’s barefoot and wears a loose wrap around his waist. Behind him is a simple hut he built himself, covered with palm fronds. The man is William Pester. He’s been living in the desert for…
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Sun Belt Cities from the Sky
Michael Light often snaps his photos from a two-seater plane — at a bumpy 70 mph — that he pilots himself at the same time, but you’d never know it from his well-composed aerial shots. From swimming-pooled suburbs in Phoenix to razed hills awaiting their luxury homes in Nevada, Light has been documenting the western…
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Llano del Rio
“Squaring the Circle” was a celebration of the centennial of the socialist colony Llano del Rio in the Antelope Valley, founded in 1914 by Job Harriman. Harriman ran for mayor of Los Angeles on the Socialist ticket, but an ill-timed bombing by labor activists destroyed his chances. Fed up with local politics, he decided to create…
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Dune Forum
A magazine on art, literature, and politics (with the occasional treatise on nudity) Dune Forum was published in the early 1930s in the artists’ colony of Moy Mell, on the central California coast. Its founding editor, Gavin Arthur, aimed to provide a view point that would “express the creative thought of America looking not toward Europe but toward the…