Thursday, March 6, 2008 – Campus Art

Sometimes a stroll through the campus of a college will clear your head – all those earnest young people who think there could be a future and all that.  It'll do. Down on Pico, just up the hill from the Pacific, there's Santa Monica College – a two-year community college that opened in 1929 with just 153 students and now has a big campus with over 30,000 of the hopeful and optimistic. Why not? Consider the alumni – James Dean, Dustin Hoffman, Rickie Lee Jones, Monica Lewinsky, Sean Penn and Hilary Swank, among others.  And they have the best public radio station in America, KCRW, the home of Harry Shearer and Le Show.  The whole place has a good vibe.

And the enclosed garden at the Art Department is cool.

Curb art –

The campus is acre after acre of utilitarian and somewhat brutal geometric architecture. It's all institutional, of course – but the colors are good, and the geometry pleasant enough.

If you wish to use any of these photos for commercial purposes I assume you'll discuss that with me. And should you choose to download any of these images and use them invoking the "fair use" provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976, please provide credit, and, on the web, a link back this site.

Technical Note:

Photographs after March 3, 2008, were taken with a Nikon D200 – or a Nikon D70 when noted. All previous photographs were taken with the D70. The lenses used are (1) AF-S Nikkor 18-70 mm 1:35-4.5G ED, or (2) AF Nikkor 70-300 mm telephoto, or (3) AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor 55-200 mm f/4-5.6G ED. Photography here is modified for web posting using Adobe Photoshop 7.0.  The earliest photography in the archives was done with a Sony Mavica digital still camera (MVC-FD-88) with built-in digital zoom.

All text and photos, unless otherwise noted, Copyright © 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 - Alan M. Pavlik