A Snapshot of Leimert Park

It’s early on a Saturday morning in Leimert Park, South Los Angeles, and the sun is already sharp and hot. Stalls are starting to take shape as owners unpack homemade soaps, taxidermy crocodiles, Venus flytraps, and hand-dyed clothing in preparation for a weekly marketplace. Midway down Degnan Boulevard is Ora Urban Café, a hip coffee shop with large storefront windows. Across the glass, vinyl lettering announces a photography exhibition inside: The Heartbeat of Culture: Documenting the Rhythm of Leimert Park.

Inside the cafe, 55 photographs are on display, printed at various sizes, some in black-and-white, others in color. They line the walls and peek out from a bookcase and among plants, objects, and pamphlets. This integration of art and life speaks to the ethos of the exhibition, which seeks to document a community while creating a generational throughline linking the past, present, and future of Leimert Park, a neighborhood known as a center of African American culture.

The photographs were taken by the 16 participants who formed the Leimert Park Photography Workshop––a 14-week initiative supported by a partnership between the nonprofit community arts organization LA Commons and Getty. The participants ranged in age from teenagers to seniors, with photography experience from novices to art school graduates. Some identified as artists, while others have careers as a bodyguard, community organizer, fashion model, and archivist.

Every week, Halline Overby, the workshop’s instructor and curator of the exhibition, led classes addressing different aspects of photography—from theory to technique and practice. He continually referred back to the central subject, Leimert Park, and the historic inspiration of Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985, an exhibition that was on view at Getty.

“Photography is a language, and as a photographer, you’re trying to convey a message, creating a document of a particular time, place, and people,” remarks Overby.

Generational exchange

The Getty exhibition spoke to a particularly dynamic period of Black creative expression and photographic documentation across the United States. Many of the exhibiting artists, including Bruce Talamon, Roy Lewis, and Frank Stewart, attended Getty’s Artist Open House event on February 24 and talked about their work with the workshop participants. A dynamic generational exchange between photographers occurred.

One workshop participant, uraeus, describes the encounter as a realization of enduring legacies: “I believe that being an artist is an objectively crazy thing to do, but you have to believe in your crazy more than the logic of the world,” she says. “So yes, it’s crazy, but being surrounded by Black artists and Black patrons was a much-needed reminder that I come from a long line of people who are artists.”

For uraeus, the workshop inspired her to pick up photography again, a practice that had subsided since art school, but which she continues to maintain through long “photography walks” in the area—an exercise from one of Overby’s workshops. In her photograph If You Do Nothing Else, a vibrant image showing a red refrigerator nestled within a shelter-like structure, uraeus captures an inanimate object that in turn signifies an active community initiative. Stocked with free snacks, the fridge feeds the community, including uraeus when she reached the end of a three-hour photography walk around the neighborhood. “I was in service to Leimert Park, and it fed me back,” she says. This notion of giving back to the community through art is a recurring theme across the participants’ practice and the exhibition as a whole.

Documenting people with a story to tell

The poet Dorothy Randall Gray was another workshop participant, though she had never worked in the medium before. “My goal was to capture these people and these projects that had a story to tell—that needed to be shown and shared with the community,” she says. As she talks through each work in turn, the images deepen in meaning. What first appear to be straightforward portraits become records of people, histories, and community ties that shape Leimert Park. This is particularly apparent in her picture Ben Caldwell, Iconic Leimert Park Visionary. Caldwell is the founder of KAOS Network, a multimedia performance space where the Leimert Park Photography Workshop would gather each week.

Gray describes how every Saturday, Caldwell opens his space to anyone who wants to stop by, with activities specifically for kids that range from playing chess to motorizing toys, all free of charge. For Gray, it was important to identify these “icons in the community,” such as Caldwell, and to honor them through photography. When asked if there was a work from Getty’s Black Arts exhibition that left an impression, she mentions Ralph Arnold’s Soul Box (1969)––a memory box that reflects similar ideas of gathering and memorializing a moment in time––a project Gray would like to emulate.

The Leimert Park Photography Workshop is the latest collaboration between LA Commons and Getty, building on a decade-long partnership. For Karen Mack, founder of LA Commons, this project reflects “many of the values at the heart of our organization: bringing generations together, fostering collaboration between participants and community, creating opportunities for skill building, and using the arts as a tool for connection and documentation.”

Christian Morales, community engagement coordinator at the Getty Museum, believes this project will become part of “the longstanding history of both LA Commons and Leimert Park, preserving a meaningful snapshot of this community and the people who helped shape it.”

The Heartbeat of Culture: Documenting the Rhythm of Leimert Park has now closed, but a booklet commemorating the artworks is available to view at getty.edu.