Philip L. Fradkin

Philip Fradkin is currently working on the text for a book about the California coast to be published by the University of California Press. The photographs for the book will be taken by his son Alex, who as a six-year-old accompanied Philip when he was researching his first book in the early 1970s. California, the Golden Coast was published by Viking in 1974. Alex was six-years-old at the time, now he is in his 40s and is an accomplished photographer whose work on the coast and other projects can be seen at www.alexfradkin.com.

The text and photographs are clustered around the seven predominant land uses and the overarching force impacting the coast. They are--in the order from the Oregon to the Mexican borders they will appear in the book--the wilderness, agricultural, residential, tourist, recreation, industrial, and military coasts. A concluding chapter titled "The Political Coast" describes how politics has shaped the shoreline. For each coast, an emblematic place is chosen: for example, the Lost Coast in Humboldt County for the wilderness coast and the Bolsa Chica wetlands in Orange County for the political coast. A short extract from the draft preface follows:

"The California Coast stretches 1,100 miles from the Oregon border to the Mexican border; or, to put it in terms more expressive of its great latitudinal reach, from a dense dripping rain forest to an open scratchy desert. The equivalent distances in the Midwest are from Cincinnati to New Orleans and in the East from Boston to the border of the Carolinas. The California coast is long; in fact, it is very long and thus very diverse.

"Along the way there are extremes in the types of natural beauty, human despoliation, and the occupations and constructs of humans that mirror what occur elsewhere in California. For the coast, in many ways, defines the state. Eighty percent of the state’s nearly forty million inhabitants live within thirty miles of the coast.

"Human tides have repeatedly swept over the coastal areas of California. First came the earliest Native Americans migrating via the Bering Strait land bridge to the north. They were succeeded by the tribes who pushed them out. Then came the Hispanics and Latinos from the south. They were followed by the Anglo-dominated races from the east during the Gold Rush years. Asian-dominated races arrived before and after the turn of the nineteenth century. Most recently Latinos, again from the south, and Asians, again from the west, have arrived on the shores of California. There were a number of lesser ebbs and flows in between these major inundations. The result is a human history dominated by rapid change and transience and a landscape that no one group could lay claim to for any extensive length of time, although each succeeding cluster has made that attempt.

"All eventually became Californians, and Californians are irresistibly drawn to the hypnotic movement and seemingly infinite presence of water. The proof? Look where these new natives have chosen to build most densely and how close to the water they prefer to huddle. They want to see, smell, touch, bathe, and surf in it, or just be in its presence, whether supine, sitting, or standing.

"There is a herding instinct at work. The long oceanic swells that cross the Pacific in one direction clash with the human tides, including millions of tourists each year, migrating westward toward the narrow coastal strip. People move in and occupy this narrow land base, pushing others closer to the edge until, quite literally, they topple in their ill-conceived dwellings into the ocean that continuously eats away at the land.

"A compacted human mass clings precariously to the earthquake, storm, and wildfire-riddled coast where the climate is equitable, the living gracious, and the scenery spectacular. Some rarities prevail. There are interludes of sparsely inhabited lands——more accurately imagined as islands——either used by the military or preserved as state and national parks, which, if not exactly pristinely green, provide startling patches of natural beauty and relief from the densely-packed population that keeps impinging upon these open spaces like a red tide."

Perhaps this will give some sense, along with Alex's photographs, of the ambitious project that father and son are currently working on. Philip's work on the text is nearing completion, and the book will most likely be published in 2010. The author has a firm idea for the book that will follow, which will be his thirteenth.