Recent Terrains

In this volume of 60 black-and-white panoramas, photographer Laurie Brown documents the changing landscape along the western edge of Southern California. These stark images reveal a world scraped and reshaped by construction equipment - boulders pushed aside, stretches of earth flattened and then measured with surveyor sticks. High-tech housing developments rise in these places, lines of identical homes that simultaneously offer a pleasing vision of order and a numbing prospect of sterile conformity. Taken during the last decade of the 20th century, these photographs serve as an archive of change at a specific place on the coastal edge of California at the turn of the millennium. But these images have larger relevance for all of us, exploring our ideas about what constitutes a home and what defines our sense of community. The book is divided into three sections, each prefaced by a poem by Los Angeles poet Martha Ronk; it concludes with an essay by writer and conservationist, Charles E. Little.