Echo Park photographer and community volunteer, William Nettles, will be exhibiting photos and art prints created as part of his work on Ron Emlers book Ghosts of Echo Park-a pictorial history. Nettles, 42 has lived with his wife in the community for the last fifteen years learning to love the community and its people.
This is by far the most exciting neighborhood of Los Angeles. With its diversity of people and beautiful hills that embrace everything from inexpensive apartments to designer homes of millionaires, Echo Park is clearly where Los Angeles and maybe America is going in the next century. Its been very exciting to live here. I feel that everything Ive ever done in Echo Park has been returned to me double. It was inevitable that I would photograph the Echo Park I call home.
Nettles, born and raised in Detroit Michigan, studied photography, art history, politics, and filmmaking at the University of Michigan. He then worked as a photo assistant in New York City. I knew I was coming to Los Angeles, so I went to New York first, otherwise I would have missed New York. He spent two years in Montreal, Quebec as a fashion and jazz photographer before moving to Los Angeles.
In Los Angeles Nettles has renovated Victorian houses in Santa Monica, worked for art galleries and built a successful photography career. He is respected as one of the best art documentation photographers on the West Coast-photographing the paintings, sculptures and installations of artists that include David Hockney, Peter Shire, Ed Moses, Carlos Almaraz, Raúl Guerrero, Gronk, Richard Diebenkorn and many others. A photo job last year for sculptor Robert Graham (1984 Olympic Monument, Duke Ellington Memorial, etc) has grown into more varied assignments as a member of Grahams studio crew. Nettles uses his extensive computer and photography skills as well as his art background to help Graham with digital imaging projects for Paris Vogue, the recent successful proposal for the bronze doors commission for the new Los Angeles Cathedral and many other projects for which Graham sends him as his representative to places as diverse as Oaxaca, Mexico City and Kansas City. Other recent projects include the recent album photography for fellow ex-Detroiter Wayne Kramer on Epitaph Records.
Echo Park remains a continual self-assignment for Nettles. Its really difficult photographing things you are intimately familiar with. Youre too close to the subject. Its much easier to drive to the Grand Canyon and figure out several good angles. Thus Echo Park is a real challenge. I began photographing at the lake before dawn ten years ago and came up with one image. In the last year Ive taken thousands of images. Sometimes I simply fear that a house might be torn down or a business moved, but mostly I take pictures of what Echo Park means to me.
The water color prints are created on the computer from original photographs. Too often people who know, or think they know, Echo Park have a preconceived idea of what the area is like. They think Echo Park is old but not historical, curious but not interesting, threatening but not welcoming. In my prints I remove the telephone wires, straighten out camera distortion and soften the edges. The result is more idealized. Here is my vision of Echo Park-isnt it beautiful I dont see the wires, and broken gates, and windows that need painting-I see it the way people who go to Italy to walk around Renaissance towns see Florence. I want to ask them Wouldnt you just want to sit on the porch across the street from that house and just watch the sun pass across it The best is when they realize thats a house theyve driven past a thousand times and all you might have noticed is a weight lifting machine on the porchnot that its wonderful little Victorian. I try to show it to them through my eyes.
My black and white photography is closer to who I am than how I perceive the community. Its more of how I feel in passing moments in my world. The serenity of the lake at 5 am, the strength of a tree trunk, a particular view of houses dotting the hillside. Black and white images are incredibly expressive and subtle. I usually make a bunch of quick prints hang them up for a month or so and then take them down. The ones I miss I spend more time
printing-I dont ask why they tell me.
Nettles show at Ojala, 1549 Echo Park Avenue, will open September 5th. The opening 6:30 -9 pm will include temporary exhibits from the book Ghosts of Echo Park featuring a special appearances by author Ron Emler and Walter Abbenseth, Echo Parks expert on the street cars. Mr Abbenseth is eager to answer questions and tell stories about Echo Park history. The show will remain hanging in the gallery for the month of September with gallery hours Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. Nettles will be available during the exhibit
month to answer questions. I learned from the artist Gronk that part of an artists duty and a part of the fun is to meet and speak with the people who come to see the art.
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