Venice, California
Karen Ballard
An insider’s view of the iconic, quirky, Los Angeles coastal town long known as a bohemian haven, an artistic hub, and public beach, a place where beauty, surf, wealth, and the harsh realities of 21st century America exist side by side. Over the last decade, legendary Venice (a.k.a. Venice Beach) has slowly evolved from its storied past to its colorful, complicated, modern present.
Venice is a neighborhood of the city of Los Angeles founded on July 4, 1905, by Abbot Kinney, a conservationist and dreamer who had won a bet granting him vast swaths of swampy marshland south of Santa Monica. His vision was to create a resort town with a certain cultural level to have the “Venice of America,” complete with canals and gondolas, as well as an amusement park on a pier on the Pacific Ocean. Most of it has now gone; the original pier was destroyed by fire years ago, and only a few canals remain, but to his credit, Abbot Kinney’s dream has lived on. Millions of people visit Venice Beach every year, making it Southern California’s second most popular tourist attraction after Disneyland.
Preview
Over the years, movie stars, artists, writers, gangs, drifters, and today’s “hipsters” have all lived in Venice. Feature films, commercials, and TV shows have been shot here from as early as 1914, with Charlie Chaplin’s Kid Auto Races at Venice, and up to 2023 with the most recent blockbuster, Barbie. For some the beach is also “Muscle Beach” where bodybuilders such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lou Ferrigno worked out. Venice also has a reputation as a carefree mecca where “The Doors” started up with Jim Morrison in the 1960s. Then skateboarding took off, and it was “Dogtown, USA” in the 1970s.
More recently, for some of the 40,000 residents, the tech boom, gentrification and the associated wealth have been a blight on the spirit of the gritty beach town. Ever larger differences in income plus sky-rocketing rents and a large homeless population made worse by the pandemic flipped Venice on its head. Sometimes just walking down the street can become a slalom, negotiating a path through the homeless people while in the background police attempt to maintain law and order. But there is always something new to see and try, e.g. on trendy Abbot Kinney Boulevard, there’s a top chef with vegan ice-cream.
I had never imagined that after fifteen years the project should still see further transition. The inequality and wealth seen in Venice are now a common phenomenon throughout America in the 21st century. Venice is still evolving, and this body of work stands as a visual study and reference to the city’s past and future.
Karen Ballard
May 6, 2024
