Description
"It's not often that stunning photographs and powerful writing come together with equal force, but that is exactly what happens with The Left Coast. The team of Fradkin and Fradkin has created a book that shares their distinct visions of the California coast. Their collaboration forms a compelling journey equally strong in words and images." -Mark Klett, School of Art, Arizona State University"Early last century, writer-photographer J. Smeaton Chase and literary landscapist Mary Austin made pilgrimages along the pristine shores of California. A father-son team now makes the same journey with notebook and camera to document what a century of development has wrought. The result is a fascinating and unique portrayal of the California coast."- Kevin Starr, University of Southern California"These photos are beautiful, surprising and thoughtful. By visualizing the coast as a whole, this book helps us think bioregionally, and such large-scale thinking will, hopefully contribute to the coast's preservation." -Robert Dawson, co-author of The Great Central Valley: California's Heartland
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Philip L. Fradkin, one of California’s most acclaimed environmental historians, felt drawn to the coast as soon as he arrived in California in 1960. His first book, California: The Golden Coast, captured the wonder of the shoreline’s natural beauty along with the controversies it engendered. In The Left Coast, the author and his photographer son Alex Fradkin revisit some of the same places they explored together in the early 1970s. From their written and visual approaches, this father-son team brings a unique generational perspective to the subject. Mixing history, geography, interviews, personal experiences, and photographs, they find a wealth of stories and memorable sights in the multiplicity of landscapes, defined by them as the Wild, Agricultural, Residential, Tourist, Recreational, Industrial, Military, and Political coasts. Alex Fradkin’s expressive photographs add a layer of meaning, enriching the subject with their distinctive eloquence while bringing a visual dimension to his father’s words. In this way, the book becomes the story of a close relationship within a probing study of a varied and contested coastline.
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