$15.00 CAD
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Photo postcard with early aerial view of Hollywood, looking North. Taken by famed California aerial photographer Robert Spence.
Printed on photo negative ‘HOLLYWOOD © SPENCE’. In LR corner, photo ID ‘Spence © F-778'.
The photographic paper used (DOPS) dates it to 1925-1942.
Unused.
Light mark on back.
(Red text is an electronic watermark that is not physically part of the photo for sale)
During the roaring twenties, Los Angeles bigshots hired Robert Earl Spence to take aerial photographs of their homes, paying $10 a picture. Spence himself did not fly; he hired a pilot and airplane. He would lean out from the open cockpit, focusing his 46-pound camera on his target at an angle instead of shooting straight down. Rather than simply showing roof and treetops, his oblique shots captured the ornamental details of a home and its surroundings all the way to the horizon.
For five decades, Spence leaned out over California and the west, taking pictures that would chronicle the growth of suburbs and freeways, along with harbors, dams, aircraft plants, and skyscrapers. He captured the filming of Cecil B. DeMille’s Ben Hur, a 1928 football game at the Rose Bowl, the construction of Dodger Stadium, Disneyland as an island in a sea of orange groves in the mid-1950s, and countless marinas sprouting along the coast.
“An inveterate aerial historian” is how John Franklin, former curator of the photographs at the University of California at Los Angeles, once described Spence. “When he flew out to take a picture for a client, he would shoot on the way out and back."
www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/oldies-and-odditieshe-shot-california-58820211/#iXu3gxLhgPDbDeCS.99
