Vermont Street Community: South Central Los Angeles

Lewis Watts documents cultural landscapes: where people live, how they interact with their environments, and the traces they leave behind. Focusing particularly on people from communities which are shown negatively or simply ignored by society, Watts portrays the theme of invisibility both poignantly and humorously. His detailed imagery offers a ìslice of lifeî that challenges us to consider a deeper meaning for what we see as well as what we donít.

The images from Vermont Street Community and the surrounding areas in South Central Los Angeles came from a commission Watts was given by the Los Angeles County Arts Commission. Being half African American and half Latino, Watts was immediately drawn to the areaís diverse population. Also included are a number of storefront churches and religious iconographyóa prevalent theme in Wattsí workóthat express his belief that churches culturally transmit the essence and values of society. The areaís businesses and vernacular architecture reflect the history, culture, language and contemporary experience of the residents. Vermont Street is the second busiest corridor in LA for bus travel. This complex and diverse area includes the former campus of Pepperdine University, which is now the Crenshaw Christian Center ìFaith Dome,î a 3,000- member church, as well as many smaller places of worship, some multi-cultural and bi-lingual.

Vermont Street Community is in line with Wattsí general interest in the cultural landscapes of other places he has examinedóplaces like West Oakland, Compton, Harlem, East St. Louis, New Orleans and parts of the rural south. His use of color photography for the Vermont Street series is appropriately suited to the southern California light and the image consciousness that is prevalent in the area's culture.  

Lewis Watts

Lewis Watts has worked extensively as a photographer, archivist and curator on many projects involving the documentation of architecture and architectural preservation, visual history, educational materials, fine-arts projects and portraiture. His photographs have been featured in numerous exhibitions including Picturing Modernity at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photography, 1840 to the Present, organized by the Smithsonian Institute. Wattsí book, Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era was published by Chronicle Books in 2006.

Mr. Wattsí photographs are part of the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Oakland Museum of California, Light Work of Syracuse, New York, The Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. He has received several awards and honors during his career, most recently a Major Project Grant from the Art Research Institute of the University of California, Santa Cruz for the development of the project Jazz After Katrina in collaboration with Professor Eric Porter of the university's American Studies Department.

Watts is Associate Professor at the Department of Art, University of California, Santa Cruz. He holds a BA in Political Science and a MA in Photography and Design from the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught visual studies and photography for 25 years.  

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