Framing the Formless: Photography’s Urban Renewal in 1940s Los Angeles

This paper considers the challenges of imaging and imagining the post-World War II city in California through photobooks. In 1942, the interdisciplinary urban renewal and planning collective Telesis sponsored the production of a photobook called Cities are for People: The Los Angeles Region Plans for Living, by journalist Mel Scott and graphic designer Alvin Lustig. Scott used photography of infrastructure and architecture to represent the region and propose directions for its future at a moment when social documentary photography waned in popularity and new architectures arose in California in need of visual languages through which to understand them. Envisioned collaboratively by city planners, architects, photographers, and graphic designers, the publication demonstrates ambivalence towards photography’s capacity to alter the perception of cities. The book’s exploration of the city’s potential through photography and graphic design presaged editor John Entenza’s endeavors with Arts & Architecture magazine and the Case Study House program and reveals a nascent concern with what urbanist Kevin Lynch would later term a city’s “imageability.” Moreover, Cities are for People provokes questions about the collectivity espoused in producing visions of urban living in the 1940s as cities were increasingly segregated and housing options depleted. By examining photography’s role in city planning discourses, we can better understand how two mutually constitutive histories – the establishment of urban renewal as a powerful force in wartime LA and the shifting efficacy of photography’s documentary potentials – fundamentally altered the California’s relationship to its representations as well as photography’s relationship to cities.