ReCurrent: Backlot & Barrio

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Announcer: This is a Getty Podcast.

[Voices yelling over sirens, photos snapping. Voice over radio says “All units respond”]

[Brass music begins]

George Rodriguez: You could be somewhere like in East LA at a school walkout and then you come back and in a half an hour, now you’re working on Hollywood magazines. They’re not aware of the other situation, they’re totally different worlds.

Jaime Roque: That’s photographer George Rodriguez, the most influential Southern California photographer you likely haven’t heard of until now. He is talking about his experience of shooting Hollywood on one role of film and the Latino experience on the next.

Hello, my name is Jaime and welcome to ReCurrent.

Roque: If you haven’t heard of George Rodriguez, that’s okay. Before this story, I hadn’t either. Now, I want you to imagine this—I’m at lunch with Idurre Alonso, Head of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Getty. We’re talking about possible topics for ReCurrent’s new season. In-between bites she asks, “You know George Rodriguez?” My first thought was, “Yeah, I know a couple George Rodriguez’, but probably not the one you are talking about.” So, I say: “No.” Then boom—crash course: the East LA walkouts, the Chicano Moratorium, farmworkers marching with César Chávez and the UFW… then a hard cut to Hollywood—red carpets, studio lots, and faces you might know and recognize: Michael Jackson, N.W.A., Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, even Marilyn Monroe. I was hooked and I needed to know more.

[Percussion music begins]

Rodriguez: My name is George Rodríguez and I was born here in LA, actually in South Central.

Roque: George is born in 1937 and not long after that, his dad opens a shoe repair shop on Skid Row. The shop is downstairs and the family in the back. By the late ’40s, around twelve, George is back in South Central LA. While attending Fremont High, George is in need of an elective. A friend suggests a photography course because he heard it was easy. And it turns out, George loves it and begins putting in hours of practice, getting as much experience as he can. Then, one small favor for a friend changes everything.

Rodriguez: What happened exactly was a friend of mine that I was in school with, he needed a ride to Hollywood so I gave him a ride. I had luckily parked in front of a photo studio and I saw this guy setting up to take some photographs. I went in and talked to him and that man was Sid Avery.

Roque: Sid Avery was one of Hollywood’s go-to photographers in the 1950s and ’60s—famous for candid, off-set portraits and photo essays that ran in magazines that were on nearly everyone’s coffee table across the country. Magazines like LIFE, Look, Collier’s, and The Saturday Evening Post. His subjects spanned Audrey Hepburn, James Dean, Humphrey Bogart, Elizabeth Taylor, and more.

Rodriguez: Coincidentally he was starting a photo lab so, I went and applied to work and I got a job there working in the Hollywood area.

Roque: Famous Hollywood names start to stack up as the work increases.

Rodriguez: I guess he liked me so he would have me assist him on shoots he would do.  And he, like I say, we went to Lucille Ball’s house and I was only about 18 years old and I loved it. But then after a while you know you take it for granted, having conversations with Michael Jackson and Jim Morrison. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, you know, you don't think about it, until later do you realize how special that is.

Roque: The origin story’s set—a kid from South Central, trained at Fremont, hustling in labs and on sets. But things are about to change for him. He doesn’t know it yet but the frame is starting to shift.

Rodriguez: I remember when I worked at this law firm publishing company, if I knew things were going on I would leave at lunchtime and go to East LA and shoot the stuff.

[Trumpet music begins]

Roque: March of 1968. George is now working at the photo lab at Columbia pictures, which publishes celebrity pics like Frank Sinatra and Warren Beatty and movie premiers like Bye Bye Birdie and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But across town, students from Wilson, Garfield, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Belmont High Schools walk out.

[Fast-paced guitar music]

They are protesting overcrowded schools, scarce resources, and bias against Mexican American students. It became a defining action of the Chicano Movement—which was a civil-rights wave led by Mexican Americans to win better schools, labor rights, representation, and control over their own story.

Rodriguez: You could be somewhere like in East LA at a school walkout and it’s immersed in 100 percent Chicano Mexican environment and then you come back and in a half an hour, now you’re working on Hollywood magazines and they’re not aware of the other situation and they really don’t care and they don’t get it.

[Trumpet music]

Roque: Speaking to George, something clicks for me: culture is made and kept by the people who show up. George did—and saved what might’ve been forgotten. He was there, documenting the movement, yes, and also participating by documenting it. Researching this episode, I poured through the 2018 monograph “Double Vision”, which catalogued George’s career. I was surprised to find picture after picture that I recognized—from my old Chicano Studies textbooks. Photographs of a requiem procession for Robert F. Kennedy the day after he died that ran down Brooklyn Ave. to East LA College. Robert Kennedy was a big supporter of César Chávez and the United Farm Workers, or UFW, so his death was a big deal for Mexican Americans. I find photographs of the Chicano Moratorium—the anti–Vietnam War protests led by Mexican Americans. And photographs of the United Farm Workers organization, in Delano, in the Central Valley: the boycotts, hunger strikes, and the UFW’s continuous organizing alongside César Chávez and Dolores Huerta. Huerta would go on to say George’s photos helped bring people to the cause, and that he understood it because he was part of the community.

Rodriguez: Yeah, I realize now that you know that what I lived through is actually history.

Roque: He took as many shots as he could out of fear that nobody else would. And he did so with the same care, attention, and artistry he used when taking celebrity portraits.

Roque: The originals? Many are now at the Getty Research Institute.

[Elevator moves and opens. Jaime greets someone]

I’m at the Getty Research Institute with curator Idurre Alonso. We’re going through George Rodríguez’s photos. We face 30 boxes full of decades worth of George’s contact sheets, negatives, and images.

[In background] And then we can go over all this afterwards…

You can see the craft in each of his photos. And that’s part of why these pictures live here—not just for what they show, but how they show it. Years on sets taught George to read light fast, to compose in chaos, to wait for the breath between action and after. The same eye that could flatter a movie star found the glow on a hand‑painted sign in a protest and the anger on a marcher’s face. He brought studio craft to the sidewalk—and it shows. The frames are beautiful, human, precise.

Idurre Alonso: For me, it was like, everything as a whole. I think he just wanted to document what was happening for him. Or maybe thinking on the future, but at the time it was just for him.

Roque:  In one photo, white helmeted police stand over a teen protestor beaten with batons in East LA. Another shows a sign that says, “Roosevelt Chicanos Demand Justice.” And in another, a march led by Chicano activists Brown Berets.

Alonso:  Also the depiction of East LA and Pico Rivera is, this is the 60s, this is the 70s. And, and even also these depictions of kids and the people in East LA. In the case of George Rodriguez, he’s Mexican American and he’s actually the first Chicano artist to enter the collection.

Roque: Wow. That’s powerful.

Alonso: Very powerful, yeah.

Roque: Hearing “first” lands hard. Really? the first one? And also: finally. It’s powerful to stand with Getty’s first Chicano archive. In big institutions, it can be hard to find your own heritage reflected. I work here, and even for me it’s not always obvious where my culture fits. But I find resonance in these boxes. I ask Idurre why George’s archive is here.

Alonso: You would encounter in this archive something that is not usually found in archives. So usually when you see photographs of LA in this time period, what you see is the west side. You don’t see the east. Two different universes.

Roque: In the archival boxes, it isn’t just celebrities and protests—there are records of daily life. Kids after school, storefronts on a Sunday, neighbors on the block. As George puts it, you’re photographing the politics, sure, but behind the politics, people live full lives.

George: The people, you know, they don’t realize that their heroes are just trying to make a living. That’s just like me, you know, I was taking pictures, some of this stuff was very powerful, and that’s what I… I knew that I had to do it because I thought nobody else was doing it.

Roque: Culture—images, stories, memory—is safeguarded by people long before an institution gets involved. George’s approach to documenting and capturing his culture and community is vital and alive today. [car driving] I drive to Santa Ana to meet photographer and educator William Camargo and see the legacy of George Rodriguez in action.

Roque: Hey!

William Camargo: Hey! How you doing? [chatter fades]

Camargo: My name is William Camargo. I was born in Santana, but was raised in Anaheim. My first introduction to photography was in high school. I was just actually trying to get an easy A, and it just turned out that I enjoyed photography quite a bit.

Roque: [over chatter] Already, I hear echoes of Geroge’s story—chancing into a career in pursuit of an easy A. And there are more similarities: celebrities by day and social movements by night.


Camargo: I was doing a lot of music photography too and once in a while I was stringing for a photo agency. Like these red carpets where I would always get these assignments that are like the premier of this movie in the Beverly Hotel and then the afternoon was like a protest in downtown.


Roque: But William sees George’s impact in another project.

Camargo: The book I’m finishing right now is probably one of the big influences from George too, right? It’s called Origins in Displacement.

Roque: It’s a portrait of Anaheim you don’t see on postcards.

Camargo: A lot of history was hidden or was not told. I never really learned about it until I was reading all these alternative newspapers where I first encountered these archives. I am just documenting my own community, right, walking around, photographing friends, photographing family, photographing folks I was just meeting as well. You know, people were hitting me up from Instagram being like, “Hey, come to my neighborhood. Like, I'll show you around.”

[Violin music]

Roque:  And the work continues—William in Anaheim doing work inspired by George. And there are now countless other Chicano photographers holding up their corners of the city. Photographers like  Chito, Banda, Frankie Orozco, Suitcase Joe, and Estevan Oriol. We’re in safe hands. Our culture, our community, is being recorded by this new generation of photographers.

In the next few months, George is preparing to move out of his downtown studio space, where he’s been for 25 years. This is one reason why his archive is moving to the GRI now. But even as George prepares to hang up his camera, his work isn’t vanishing. It’s multiplying. And this is what makes him one of the most influential Southern California photographers, even if this is the first you’re hearing of his story.

[Alonso in the background] I set up things so that we can…

Roque: [over background chatter] Back at Getty, Idurre and I return to the boxes of George’s photographs—thinking about how images move through hands, families, and time. They’re being catalogued not so that they can be sealed off, but so that they can be findable. And if we do this right, they’re returnable—pop-ups in schools and rec centers, library showings, neighborhood talks, and digitized sets people can search—ways to access their own history, their photos, their culture, their part of LA’s story. Preservation is step one. Circulation is step two. Inspiring the next generation is three.

Alonso: The photography department is putting together a show on Chicano photographers and George is gonna be part of it. So, in my opinion, I would like to see these photos going back to East LA, or South LA in many cases, because there’s a lot of photographs of the kids in South LA at different high schools. And how can you work with the kids today and show them these photographs and what happened and make them think about the history of what is happening now or the usage of images today because I think they’re very powerful and even though they’re like 60 years old, they’re still very relevant today because many of these issues were never resolved.

[Quick guitar music]

Roque: Knowing that Getty is preserving George Rodríguez’s archive—Getty’s first Chicano archive—means images of people who look like my family now live in Getty’s archives.

And George’s photographs belong here not only because of what they catalogue but because of how they’re built—light, line, timing—and made from inside the community. He didn’t parachute in; he belonged. He knew how to read the noon sun, how to snap a crowded scene so that it reads clear and human, and how to wait for the breath between chant and silence. And he knew how to see people—leaders, workers, kids after school—as neighbors first. That’s the human care you feel in each frame.

Writing this episode, I kept turning to the sun-faded photo of my dad that I keep on my desk. He’s on a break while working the fields of the Central Valley—no credit line, no caption, just him drinking water, looking straight into the camera. That picture is a treasure in my family. It reminds us of the sacrifices made for a better life. But artistically, I can admit it leaves something to be desired.

That’s one reason I’ve been so drawn to George’s story: because of how he brought studio chops to the street—and the farm. That craft is the difference between a snapshot and a photograph that enters the record.

But history isn’t an either/or. These images have different homes and are equally necessary. My dad’s picture is our private record—family memory, inherited meaning. George’s pictures are a record the public can see—in Los Angeles and beyond—so other Chicanos can search, learn, and recognize themselves and their heritage. One keeps a family; the other helps keep a people visible.

When I ask George about his legacy, he admits it’s hard to grasp. He says it’s only later that you realize you did something special.

Rodriguez: You know, if I can do it because my beginnings are very, very minimal. I mean, like I say, we lived on Skid Row and I was raised in South Central. If I can do it, anyone can do it. Don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t do it. Because they did tell me I couldn’t do it. You don't want to listen to those people because they don’t know you—you might be special.

[Music fades out]

Roque: Recurrent is written and produced by me, Jaime, with creative support from Zoe Goldman. Our executive producer is Christopher Sprinkle. To see the photos, head to getty dot edu slash podcast slash recurrent for some of my favorites. The museum has 41 of George Rodriguez’s images digitized and viewable. There’s a link in the show notes, and for transcripts, images, and additional resources, visit getty dot edu slash podcast slash recurrent.