Altered Horizons: Images of South Los Angeles in the 1980's

Woodrow Bailey

In the mid 1980’s, when Woodrow Bailey was a Fine Arts student at the University of Southern California, he was given a Pentax camera and told to photograph Los Angeles. While most of his classmates focused on areas around the USC campus, Bailey took his camera back to his own neighborhood in South Los Angeles and he continued to photograph the streets, alleyways, and intersections he grew up with long after the assignment was due. The result is a striking vision of South Los Angeles from Bailey’s viewpoint and a time capsule for an area that has undergone significant changes. 

Rather than shooting his subjects straight-on, Bailey frames the buildings and streets of his neighborhood at angles, adding depth by placing the objects in his images in relation to each other. Concrete alleyways, metal fences, and houses are punctuated by dense patches of foliage and lines of palm trees. People and cars are obscured and shaded by their surroundings. They hover at the edge of the frame, leading into and out of each scene. Telephone poles and road markers lead the viewer across an image and toward the horizon.

Woodrow Bailey agreed to donate his photo negatives to Pepperdine Libraries as a part of the Preserving the History of South Los Angeles collection. He met with the Librarian for Digital Publishing, Curation, and Conversion in December, 2024 to offer some commentary and context for his images. A selection of his digitized negatives and commentary are included in this exhibit.