Carbon Dated Photograph

I'm a Southern California girl who grew up between the ocean, mountains and deserts in a magical place called the San Fernando Valley; a sub-city in Los Angeles county. In the 1980's, it was definitely the place to be if you were an aspiring Yuppie and wanted all of the advantages of living in Beverly Hills without the Beverly Hills price tag. My passion for photography started then. Armed with a work horse Nikon FE that my dad had given me, I began documenting my life and my friends' lives through photographs that I organized into albums and scrapbooks. If every town has a main street, ours was Ventura Boulevard. During the day it was jam packed with traffic because of local industry and at night it was a teenagers playground. The length of Ventura Boulevard was lined with neon signs advertising everything from sushi bars to adult book shops. After a movie or some frozen yogurt, we'd cruise up and down the boulevard in our parents' foreign cars looking for local parties and places to hang out. House parties with kids in your own social class were the status quo because hanging out "over the hill" in Hollywood was not what proper kids did at that time. Those who did were often labeled and bullied at school. I'm not sure why, but all of that changed in the mid-1990's and got increasingly worse over the next few years. Businesses began closing, the neon lights either got switched off or were missing a bulb or two; and "no cruising" signs began to appear everywhere. Luckily, I was college aged at that time and moved to Santa Barbara to attend Brooks Institute of Photography. After receiving my B.A. I headed out into the world and worked as a commercial photographer for many years. Realizing that I needed a "change", I got married, moved abroad and explored the world like a vagabond. When I finally decided to come back home, I was really disappointed to see that the Valley that I had loved so much had changed as well. Melancholy took over as I ventured around town and realized that my childhood memories weren't in accord with what I was seeing now. I felt robbed and cheated and had a talk with my mother about it later that evening. She laughed saying that the Valley had always been that way, but that I'd been viewing it through the eyes of a child; and according to her, children always view the world through rose colored glasses.