I came into this world on the front seat of a '65 Buick station wagon. My mother's fourth child and ninth pregnancy, I was just about due and my mother, needing a break from my three older sisters, was checking into St. Francis Hospital in Lynwood at the last minute to rest her nerves for a few days. En route driving down Imperial Highway in Watts, she went into labor, raising herself onto her hands as I slid silently, without crying, onto the seat of my parents' new car. "Drive faster, Wendell-she's coming out," my mother pleaded with my father. He obliged and suddenly he had company-a police cruiser pulled up alongside their now-speeding car, and the officer began signaling for my father to roll down the window. "She's out, Wendell-don't roll down the window. She'll catch cold," my frightened mother implored, frantically worried that I, too, was a stillborn birth. She had already had four. She knew that the police car was alongside them, and figured that they were escorting us safely to the hospital. After all, it was one o'clock in the morning. We arrived at the hospital where the chief of police himself awaited my "fugitive" father; I was labeled "unclean" and placed in the room with my mother rather than in the infirmary with the infants that had been born at the hospital. It was only later that my mother found out that the police had not escorted them at all-they had held a shotgun trained on my father the whole time.

I was born less than two months after the Watts riots burned through south Los Angeles in August 1965. The police remained on alert, instantly wary of a black man speeding through the night in a brand new car, willfully disregarding their commands to halt. At the time, my family lived near the corner of Santa Barbara (now Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd.) and Normandie avenues and my grandparents lived a few houses off Broadway on 51^st Street-we didn't even know anyone who, technically, lived in Watts, but from that instance forward, anywhere black folks lived in Los Angeles became identified with Watts. Bustling, convenient thoroughfares were reduced overnight into pockmarked battlefields where retailers and white folks forever after feared to tread. The neighborhood and their way of life, especially for my homemaker, non-driving grandmother, were permanently altered. Her vivid recollections of holiday decorations up and down Broadway and clean, easy streetcars seemed quaint against the vivid reality of boarded-up shop windows, high prices, and more difficult access to goods and services.

In 1992 my grandmother was still living on 51^st Street, and I with her, when the first verdict in the Rodney King police brutality trial was handed down. I drove home after dark that early evening, marveling at the number of people who were out and about on the street, unusual for our neighborhood. When I approached home and saw my sister and our next-door neighbor standing on our porch talking, I knew something wasn't right. Within a couple of hours, as the corner furniture store was just beginning to smolder and the television news warned that no emergency services were responding to our area, we hustled our reluctant grandmother from her fifty-year home, I grabbed family photos and my negatives, and we hopped on the 110 freeway just before the police closed all the on- and off-ramps (presumably to prevent the rioters from spreading outside of their own neighborhoods too quickly) and we headed for the suburban safety of my parent's home thirty miles to the east.

For the next couple of days I lay numb on the sofa, watching the familiar landmarks of my childhood one by one go up in flames. I watched the news as neighborhoods in Hollywood and further west that were nowhere near South Central got labeled as such as they, too, ignited with fury and frustration. I worried about our home left hastily behind, but I felt no anger towards the arsonists, looters, and rioters, most of whom I could see weren't black, despite what reporters were saying. I knew that so much disenfranchisement and poverty and anger and powerlessness was inevitably bound to boil over, spilling its red-hot rage into the streets like so much unleashed passion and fear.

Many of the residents at the Imperial Courts housing project in Watts, fearful of their lives and possessions like everyone else, locked their doors and went inside while pockets of the city burned that spring of 1992. Not everyone was on the evening news running down the street pushing a shopping cart overflowing with televisions or tossing a Molotov cocktail to bring "the man" and his establishments to their knees; common sense and a healthy cynicism about media representation suggested otherwise. In time, national and civic leaders rallied, hired an ex-baseball commissioner to help "rebuild L.A." and made all sorts of promises of jobs, renewal, and change. And then, just like in 1965, nothing happened, and thereafter the majority of residents who had relied upon the convenience of the corner market and the gas station just down the street, and who had once again pinned their dwindling hopes on the promise of an accessible, stable source of income, had to pay a little more now to get a lot less.

The grandly-, ironically-named Imperial Courts at 116^th Street and Imperial Highway are the second largest of the twenty-one federal housing projects in the city of Los Angeles built between 1941 and 1962.³ Despite what I thought was the reasonably entertaining story of my birth that somehow linked me in a special way to my "'hood"-one I trotted out to entertain friends on many occasions-I had never been to any of the projects and had never entertained the thought of going-South Central where I lived was "real" enough. It is ironic that Amsterdam-born Dana Lixenberg would be criticized for being a white woman photographing poor black people in the projects, ⁴ because most of the black people I know, many of whom grew up in South Central, voiced a variation on: "Oh, uh uh, the projects? I wouldn't be going over there," when I said I was writing about portraits of people who lived at Imperial Courts. It is an all-too-often-expressed, seldom-acknowledged sentiment among many middle-class blacks toward their own people, and though I understand where it comes from, it still rankles, makes me feel slightly ashamed that I do know what they mean.

The men, women, and children who live at the Imperial Courts, save for those few who have moved away or died in the interim, are exactly where they were in 1993 when Dana Lixenberg first photographed them just prior to the outcome of the second trial of the accused officers in the King case. Their lives, at times, seemed like an inner-city recasting of Waiting For Godot, an existential exercise in numbing futility, of waiting, and waiting, and waiting some more. The same table of men playing bid whist or dominos on broken chairs, drinking 40s and talking shit, the same bored, restless, and denied adolescents riding miniature bikes, dodging bullets, and learning life's lessons from the gang members who are their parents and role models, the same strong, tired women trying to hold it together even though together doesn't look all that together, either.

In early 1993, on a grant from the Dutch government, Lixenberg spent a month going daily to Imperial Courts to observe and photograph the residents there. Initially they were leery of her presence and intentions, and with good reason. Beginning with the controversial police shooting in November 1991 of twenty-eight-year old Henry Peco during a blackout at Imperial Courts, the residents had been inundated with news media and politicians. About two weeks before the first verdicts, members of the Crips and Bloods rival gangs at the Imperial Courts, Nickerson Gardens, and Jordan Downs projects drafted a treaty based on an Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement, announced a truce, and effected a moratorium on inter-gang killings. Then the riots/uprising/rebellion happened; presidential hopeful Bill Clinton toured the area.

Tony Bogard was one of the truce's authors and Lixenberg's initially reluctant contact in the community. He wanted to know what the photographs would do for the residents. Hands Across Watts, the community-based economic development organization that he helped found was floundering, unable to garner the corporate support that seemed so promising just a year before. Although he no longer lived at Imperial Courts, ex-gangbanger Bogard became a cause célèbre and spokesman for the 'hood, even appearing on Oprah. Had he not been murdered in January 1994 by someone from his own gang, the PJ Watts Crips, he would have seen that life at Imperial Courts and in Watts is today much as it was in 1993, and that ironically it is Lixenberg's photographs that endure to bear witness to his life, his friends, and neighbors.

Around the same time that Lixenberg arrived in Los Angeles, then-newly-elected NAACP chairman Ben Chavis took up residence at the Courts for several days awaiting the second verdicts, making promises and holding news conferences with the Courts as his sound-bite backdrop. Jesse Jackson came and stayed along the way, too. Congresswoman Maxine Waters, in whose district the Courts belong, was also a frequent presence, chatting with neighbors while news crews followed. Then, on February 17, a USA Today newspaper team transformed what was supposed to have been a positive story and photograph of homeboys turning in their weapons in a guns-for-jobs exchange into gang members arming themselves and threatening more violence with the caption: "Bravado: Los Angeles gangs say riots are certain if white police officers are acquitted of violating Rodney King's civil rights. And 'there will be more shooting.'" ⁵

It was in this atmosphere that Lixenberg arrived at Imperial Courts, using a traditional, slow, cumbersome 4 x 5, tripod-mounted view camera. Setting herself up in a courtyard, she engaged people to stop and pose as they went about their days, in the exchange creating elegantly stark, unforgettably beautiful black and white portraits of people who, for the most part, would have gone unrecorded and unphotographed. Photo historians like to say that the introduction of the Kodak box camera in 1888 made photography accessible to everyone, but practical life experience has proven otherwise. Not every household has or uses a camera; for many families, picture-taking is relegated to once-a-year school photos and driver's licenses, with an occasional prom or wedding thrown in. Lixenberg's images, like those of Richard Avedon or Chuck Close, belong to a genre of portraiture that is more studied, formal, and controlled, in which the subject emerges as more than a likeness-he or she becomes a monumental and essential archetype of humanity.

When Lixenberg returned to Imperial Courts five years later to find and give her subjects the prints she had initially promised them, they cracked up over hairstyles and clothes they can't believe they wore back then, marveled at how young so-and-so looked, and were astonished that she had cared to make good on her promise to give them prints of the images they had participated in making. They remembered her instantly as the women who "made them famous" when VIBE magazine published a dozen of the images in November 1993. They also told her that one of the men she had photographed, Spider, had been killed by Shanky, an adolescent whom she had also photographed striking a defiant, wary pose that belied his tender age. Several people asked Lixenberg if they could have a copy of the portrait of Spider-although he had been popular and a positive presence in the community, no one had a picture of him to preserve along with their verbal recollections. Not only was it unusual for an outsider to take enough interest to make such a sympathetic, honest document of them at a particular time, but moreover many of the people did not even keep an ongoing visual document of their own lives. Although contemporary culture is so image-saturated and jaded, photographs, especially portraits, still have a remarkable power to validate our existences and to demand recognition of the lives depicted. They are repositories of memory, both collective and personal, and we tend to take for granted their ability to command respect and convey emotion, to stop us dead in our tracks as we find an unspoken communion in the glance or gesture of a stranger or a friend.

As a photographer myself, I know that there would be few pictures of many of the people in my own family, who go darting and hiding from sight whenever I point the viewfinder at them, were it not for my insistence in capturing their likenesses at any and every family gathering. I always try to appeal to them to cooperate by saying: "What about your grandkids or their grandkids? One day, when you're long gone, they're going to want to see who you were, who they came from." The argument rarely works, so their descendants will mostly know that my godmother and cousin had beautiful hands and fast reflexes. In looking at Lixenberg's photographs I remember scrambling to shove family albums into shopping bags back in 1992 when we feared the worst and had to quickly and selectively chose what was worth saving of what we had accumulated. What would Lixenberg's subjects grab, I wonder, if they had to quickly flee their homes? Would they take her portraits with them now to cherish and preserve? Through her photographs, Lixenberg has given her subjects a valuable, tangible connection to their pasts as well as their futures. Moreover, she has given the rest of us a powerfully moving testament to their spirit.

1. From "People of Watts," by Ntozake Shange, a poem inspired by Dana Lixenberg's photographs, in VIBE, issue and volume number (November 1993), p. 79.

2. James Baldwin in 1972, quoted in Lynell George, "30 years after the Watts riots, two Angelenos look back and ask: Why did it happen-and will it happen again?" Los Angeles Times Home section, (August 11, 1995), page 1.

3. From the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA) website, http://www.hacla.org/about/aindex.htm, cited on 10 November 1998.

4. From a conversation with the photographer.

5. CaShears, "Dissecting a media controversy, Activist: 'Paper has done disservice,'" USA Today (March 1, 1993), page 11A.