| Ten aerial photographs, taken over three days
in May 2002, were presented in the California Museum of Photography,
as part of the exhibit Alternate Routes, curated by CLUI members
Lize Mogel and Chris Kahle, with Mitra Abbaspour, a curator at
the museum, which is located in downtown Riverside, in the heart
of the Inland Empire.
The Inland Empire is a semi-urbanized region east
of the Los Angeles basin. As large in area as the developed L.A.
and Orange County regions combined, and bounded by mountain ranges,
it has evolved into a sort of alternative version of Los Angeles,
both separate from and connected to the megalop. Here are the
steel mills, smokestacks, and racetracks of Fontana; the cement
pits and piles of Rubidoux and Colton; the quarries of Temescal
Valley; and the reservoirs of Perris, Matthews, and Diamond, massive
elevated pools, looming above ground level. Sacrificial sites
like debris basins, flood channels, and huge canyon dams control
the cataclysmic erosional dynamics caused by mountains of unconsolidated
material faced with only occasional rainfall. Big, monolithic
land uses abound between the freeways and washes - malls, railyards,
airports, business parks, and military bases. Housing occurs in
swaths of units, on land recontoured into ranges of engineered
escarpments of drainage vectors. And a frequent haze obscures
the mountains that contain the region, giving a sense of a vague
infinity to this landscape of moved earth.
Yet a sense of the exotic lurks in the Inland Empire,
too, in little eddies amidst the flow of change, in self-contained
downtowns, in secret canyons on the margins, and in old hot springs
resorts, and vestigal orange groves. The Inland Empire has a flavor
closer to the tragic, romantic, mythic Southern California paradise
than just about anywhere.
View sample images from this exhibit in the Programs
& Projects section. (closes this window)
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