California in 35mm

Words & Images: Angela Blumen

July 10 2016

Initially, my fascination with California started through my discovery of the work of photographers who would capture and use the great light from that place in their photographs. A desire to find and capture the diverse and particular light of California, along with it’s seemingly endless ‘Golden Hour’ and the lush diversity of the landscape were the main motivations to make the trip.

My trip started in San Francisco, where I met my partner in crime and th queen of the highway, Sophie. She drove the whole way! From San Francisco, we drove along the Highway 1 to Los Padres National Forest and through Big Sur. Along the way we captured the sunset over the Pacific and the Sunrise over the hills. We made our way down through Morro Bay and stopped in Santa Barbara. After, we went east toward Palm Springs, Pioneer Town, Joshua Tree and through the Mojave Desert and ended back towards Los Angeles.

 The American West coast for me was a place of contrast – the very modern lifestyle of the cities, the ubiquity of all the places between.
What was most notable, along the ever changing landscape, was the abundance of life; such a diversity of flowers, trees, insects, birds, seals. Even the geological features, the way the landscape looked, was drastically different from the start to the end of our trip. Since the landscape was to me more diverse and something I’ve never seen before I decided to capture the features on my 35mm film.

There are few places in the world where, within a few days drive, the landscape can change from hills to grand deserts (and such an eerie desert Joshua Tree Park), to deciduous forests, to forests several thousand years old, to sunburnt grasslands, to humid coastal landscapes.

I think these landscapes signify the American west coast and I really hope that the people living there will conserve both the landscape and the diversity of species.

Angela Blumen is a fashion photographer based in Copenhagen. You can find her work online.