Downtown Los Angeles From 1000 Feet
Jack Bauer can do it with his eyes closed, TC from Magnum P.I. makes it look easy, Murdock on The A-Team was supposedly insane and he could do it, yet flying a helicopter is anything but easy. Once you get up there, over all the little two-legged ants running around their infernal mazes in gas-guzzling SUVs, you realize that you have the potential to project yourself faster -in any direction- than you’ve ever gone. You, in a 4-cylinder rotor-driven machine with no doors that doesn’t actually want to fly. No, all it wants to do is to spin like a top and explode on something. It’s quite something to go up in one as a passenger and hang out the side snapping photos from 500-1000 feet up. Yet it’s quite another to do it with the childhood friend you used to cut classes with to go guzzle bottles of tequila while parked in a big brown stalker van, who intermittently breaks into NWA lyrics flying over Compton and wonders aloud if the seatbelts will hold (while making hard right turns over power lines, vats of chemicals and the 405 freeway).
The pilot
Meet Matt, gentleman, scholar of life, helicopter pilot, born two years 1 day after yours truly. During my last trip to the the west coast he was generous, wily and resolved enough to get the two of us up in the air in the two-seat Robinson R22, usually hovering at around 500 feet, over Long Beach, the RMS Queen Mary (the white dome situated next to which was the onetime home of Howard Hughes’ Spruce Goose), landing us in an airstrip in Compton, and finally circling the skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles at an altitude of well over 1000 feet.
Rising up from Long Beach Harbor, where the moist ocean air meets the dry desert wind it’s hard to tell if it’s smog or low-lying cloud cover you’re flying out of as the rush overtakes you. Suddenly you can see the whole picture, you can take in the whole view. You can see the true desert sprawl of Los Angeles county, ranging from the watering post port of Long Beach (the world’s largest), the rusted wagon wheel that are the oil derricks and processing plants of Long Beach, the flat cellblock architecture of ghostown Compton, the recent development of subdivision communities in what used to be orange groves, the old railyards and storage facilities rotting like a wasteland of metal and dust, over the merciless postwar housing boom, the showdown on main street of the Wilshire Corridor and there you are, approaching the hills to the north, there is the oasis of downtown shimmering in the heat.
Truth is, once taken in from the sky at 100 mph, these seemingly fragmented and disparate wastelands coalesce into a kind of monument to human adaptability. Of stamina and the will to overcome the elements. Hemmed in to the north by the forested hills, the east by the Mojave and the west by the Pacific, LA has always attracted the best and the wost of all things: weather, natural disasters, riots, sports teams, etc. Now long since established, the trick will be not to merely overcome the elements (mudslides, wildfires, smog) as the next generation of Angelenos awakens to this desert bloom of a city’s socio-political, environmental and economic problems, but rather to harmonize this area the Spanish first named, “Bahia de los Fumos” (Smoke Bay) as far back as the 16th century, for the next 500 years.
Thanks for the perspective Matt.
I am a documentary and portrait photographer, specializing in a raw approach to shooting everything under the sun. Though I travel abroad often, I am currently based in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, and am available for assignments throughout North America and beyond.
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All content © 2012 by Manny Santiago Photography