Proud pooch owners can commemorate their pet love and do some good in the process during Linnea Lenkus’ “Rest in Show” dog-portrait day. The Long Beach-based photographer will be shooting all day to benefit the humane education organization Friends of Long Beach Animals. Seatings are a scant $25 plus a 30-plus lb. bag of dog [...]

The Hickey Underworld, February 2008-August 2009
The Hickey Underworld was a house on Anaheim and Magnolia in Long Beach. It was called this from February ’08 to August ’09. I very much doubt the property owner will continue to call it by this name; he’d probably rather forget it ever existed.
Inside of 18 months, the residents [...]

Karlson Tea Party
Adam Wright’s engrossing black-and-white photographs of bikers, barflies, kustom kar guys—which he makes look simple—are just one reason to check out Comune’s mysteriously-named Karlson Tea Party Sunday. Another is that some of the guys Wright photographs—like Long Beach’s own motorcycle builder Chopper Dave Freston—will be on hand with their, er, choppers. Should be [...]

Blues Fest Keeps You Rockin’
The 30th Annual Long Beach Blues Festival was held at Rainbow Lagoon Park over the Labor Day weekend, showcasing some of the legends of blues, soul and gospel music. There were several show-stoppers, including Bettye Lavette covering Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” and Mavis Staples’ soulful rendition of “I’ll [...]

Jeff Atherton’s focused lack of focus

Jeff Atherton’s work (up now at one of the many Phantom Galleries sites unwrapped this week) feels like a scene snagged from some familiar late-night adventure, in which you’ve found yourself stumbling onto dim avenues lit only by a misty glow from street lamps. In the same way that objects [...]

The lo-fi beauty of Deryke Cardenaz’s ‘Two Year Walk’

The black and white images in Deryke Cardenaz’s self-published book, Two Year Walk—”low-fi photos,” he calls them—are at times out of focus, at other times uncentered, and at still other times—okay, just once, with are there somethings that make you dream?—questionably published, period. But there’s also more [...]

In an important embrace of these digital times, the ever-excellent LIFE magazine has partnered with Google to digitize its photo archives, which somehow stretch all the way back to the 1750s. Of all the Southern California shots, LA logically gets the best, but Long Beach is well represented, too. There are iconic photos of the [...]

Bixby Knolls comes together for commemorative ‘Summer Shutters’

JASON VAN FLEET’S ‘READY & WAITING’
Paste “community” alongside any unassuming noun—theater, art center, organizer—and you risk receiving a roll of the eyes in return, as if to suggest that nothing worthy of our attention or time could possibly result from involving, instructing or encouraging the common folk.
Is this [...]

Current web obsession Shorpy (the self-proclaimed 100-year-old photo blog) captures only the realest American pictures. There are shots straight from the WPA, from well-preserved family albums, from the personal piles of nostalgic users–barely any of its photos even scratch the most saturated Kodachrome. And those that do (like the above user-submitted shot of the Pike [...]

Want to see the best tattoos around? Step outside your front door
I’ve been shooting tattoos since I picked up a camera. But when I moved to Long Beach eight years ago, I discovered that as much as I loved Los Angeles for all its diversity, I could find all of that—and more—right here.
This city has [...]