Inna Ray at the Evergreen Cemetery 1974 Dia de los Muertos celebration.
Photo by Seymour Rosen, courtesy of SPACES Archives.
Between the years of 1972 and 1988, when woman street photographers were rare, Inna Ray devoted herself to shooting black and white film on the streets of Los Angeles. With the eye of a painter and the spirit of a poet, Ray documented a now-lost Los Angeles. Traveling on foot and by public bus, she shot at Venice Beach, in the Arroyo Seco, in Alta Loma, throughout Southern California. She documented the disco-era heyday of Venice Beach, Art Deco architecture, parades and festivals, cemeteries, abandoned stone buildings, pilings from lost coastal piers and the lazy days of summer with friends. It is an extraordinary record of the visual landscape of Los Angeles in those years.
Ray preserved her numbered and dated negatives in archival plastic sleeves and binders. The full collection of over 350 rolls of film is held in the TESSA Collection of the Los Angeles Public Library. Selections from the Inna Ray collection are being digitized and will be available later in 2024.
