The beach front recorded by Mudford for the Long Beach Survey of 1979 is the antithesis of what we might imagine existed there. Long Beach, once touted as the Miami Beach of the west coast was marketed as a retirement community on the edge of the Pacific. Romantic visions of the picture placed in immigrant minds probably didn't include views of the relationship that coastal Southern California had nurtured with the oil companies that drilled and pumped along the coastal reserves that extended from the Baldwin Hills in Los Angeles, through El Segundo and down into Huntington Beach.
Mudford photographs the industrial and public face of the complex relationship between port city industry and romance. He captures the zones of pure industry and the strange facade that the industry and the municipality have designed and constructed to mask the industrial nature of the city's "ocean view". There is nothing about Mudford's photographic strategy that is persuasive in and of itself. The strength of the photograph is the insight and clarity of the revealing view that he has chosen and has allowed in essence, to speak for itself.
OCEAN VIEW | CMP HOME