Los Angeles is famous for many things: its traffic jams, its taco trucks, the palm trees, the sunshine. Electric Moons: A Social History of Street Lighting in Los Angeles explores one of its most overlooked design legacies--its streetlights.
Today, we may not give streetlights much thought; after all, they're virtually everywhere. But Los Angeles was once known for its breadth of innovative designs: products of an active civic imagination and a well-timed real estate scramble. Much more than devices to illuminate the roads, streetlights helped instill senses of pride and place within a rapidly expanding metropolis, bringing the heavens to human scale. Timeless and modern, venerated and mundane, streetlights connected parochial interests to universal beliefs. They were public art before we had a name for it.
In Electric Moons, India Mandelkern examines the art and politics of street lighting in Los Angeles from the 1880s to the present day. Flitting between social history, cultural anthropology, urban studies, and the history of design, she illustrates how street lighting helped frame larger debates about civics and surveillance, infrastructure and traffic, the definition of public space and who should have access to it. Through her own conversations with the politicians, planners, preservationists, artists, and dreamers who have given them meaning, Mandelkern argues for the streetlight's vitality to urban life: a totem for the modern era.
Bertolotti, Tom: - Tom Wayne Bertolotti is a professional photographer and a humanist and has a phobia of short bios. Following enthusiasm as his guiding daemon, Tom earned a doctorate in philosophy and pursued a decade-long scholarly career across Italy (Pavia), France (Paris), and the United States (USC). After publishing a book about LEGO and Philosophy, Tom felt like there were no worlds left to conquer in academia and set off to explore human nature through photography, which is "so shallow and at the same time so deep." Tom's photographic studio, sometimes known as "Portrait Philosophy", focuses on everything people-related, from headshots to editorial and commercial shoots. If he needs to unwind, you will find him capturing iconic Southwestern landscape or cinematic urban scenes. He lives in Los Angeles, California.
Mandelkern, India: - India Mandelkern was born in Los Angeles, California, and is a graduate of Middlebury College. She received her PhD in History from the University of California, Berkeley. Since then, she has worked as a curator, consultant, and critic, and has written on art, culture, design, and the social connections that they sustain for a variety of publications, such as Vice, Curbed, Los Angeles Magazine, Roads & Kingdoms, Wine & Spirits, Eater, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. From 2016-2018 she served as a fellow at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where she studied the intersections among placemaking and public art. There, she created Chris Burden's Urban Light: A Field Guide (2018), an alternative historical take on one of LA's most iconic landmarks. She currently works at the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transit Authority (LACMTA) and lives in Los Angeles.
