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Oil City

First, Signal Hill was a place where Southern California Indians launched smoke signals. Then it was incorporated into the region's sprawling system of ranchos. Then, in 1924, Signal Hill, became a small city.

The character of this city, from its very beginning, has been shaped by the rising and falling fortunes of the oil industry. IDozens of crude wooden oil derricks were positioned on the hill to tap reservoirs of oil that lay under Signal Hill slopes. These derricks subsequently were replaced by low-slung oil pumps, many of which are now casually accepted as fixed features on the Signal Hill landscape.

After World War II, Signal Hill began its transition into a different kind of future. The postwar decline of the oil industry left large tracts of polluted land--plenty of room for new houses and apartments, and plenty of room for big-box stores, shopping malls, fast food franchises, and auto malls. Signal Hill became an entrepreneurial paradise, founded on aggressive tax policies that had been adopted by the city council. There was just one limit that was placed on entrepreneurialism: redevelopment had to leave producing oil wells alone. First things first.

Photographing Signal Hill's homes, neighborhoods, businesses, industrial plants, and religious facilities has been a unique experience. The city is located only about a half dozen miles from my home, so it is, as my son says, "haunted by familiarity." The Oil City project has required that I cast new eyes on things that I had ignored because of their everyday banality. I had often driven on Signal Hill streets, and I had often passed the city's new housing tracts, industrial facilities, shopping malls, fast food franchises, older neighborhoods, and big box stores. Initially they didn't seem worth photographing. They did not conform to preconceptions about what hard scrabble industry towns, or even towns created by redevelopment, should look like. Strangely, I had to strain to see what was really there, not to be put off by what was not there. A new, hard-to-see urban landscape had emerged on Signal Hill.

The Oil City project has been inspired by twentieth century "New Topographic" photographers (e.g., Robert Adams, Frank Gohlke, Joe Deal, Stephen Shore), who documented the ways in which people in the twentieth century had altered pristine Western landscapes. Their images, in many cases, were distanced and non-judgmental, like ones you might expect to find in government reports, chamber of commerce publications, or even on postcards.

That is the spirit of the following Oil City images, which document a second-wave or third-wave transformation of a fully urbanized, industrialized Western landscape. These images are intended as visual signals--ways of encouraging us to see more clearly the unique urban configurations that are being created as old industrial cities are being reconstructed by new generations of entrepreneurs.

The Oil City project is still a work in progress.