Donald douglas photography los angeles

There were no partner duos at that time, except for the Starn Twins, who were much more fine art. I can remember that everybody wanted us to be identical twins. We wanted to go into a very handmade direction, so we would look up much older techniques, Victorian photographs and death masks, stuff like that. We just had some old kit and an old studio with nothing in it, so we had to find ways of making images that we could actually afford to produce.

It was something kind of gothic and strange and interesting, you know? It was both modern and old at the same time. He's just such a fantastic storyteller, and he mixed in such interesting circles. He invited us to go to Switzerland with him to meet and photograph a real Swiss spy, who had a Russian controller that he had been researching. He went and sat with this guy, who seemed retired, and been called a traitor and we were kind of given the task of floating around the outside, and documenting it, actually almost like spies.

He spent most of his time kind of sitting there and laughing with us, and that allowed something else to happen. It was a really pivotal moment. There were a couple who escaped, of course.

Donald douglas photography los angeles

But with most people I think we managed to get under the skin. And because of the technique, everything was a one-off print that we could never actually replicate. So, we put all this work into storage and that was it. I sent Andrew little notes that I had done that, saying there were three books in there we should do. We always knew that there was this body of work and that we needed to do something with it, but by then, we were on the hamster wheel of keeping up with the world we had created for ourselves, so we were donald douglas photography los angeles, working, working… and, of course, we never went back.

It was such a task to dig into that, and I think it was really emotional as well. Sprawled over more than acres of now-expensive land a short distance from the beach, Santa Monica Airport began as a dirt strip in a barley field in Howard Hughes and film director Hal Roach used to tie down there. Douglas' dreams took flight there when it became the home of his aircraft plant.

DC model planes, military and civilian - up to but not including the DC - were built there. The first around-the-world flight, which was orchestrated by Douglas, took off from and landed there. Douglas, a New York native and graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, moved to Los Angeles in to take advantage of its grand flying weather.

Now, he was determined to make it on his own in the airplane business. Douglas began designing planes in the back room of a barbershop on Pico Boulevard. But times were tough. To help feed his family, he dug up his yard and planted potatoes - which promptly rotted. He resorted to washing cars. Then a wealthy sportsman, David R Davis, heard that Douglas was looking for investors.

It was to be a short-lived partnership. InDouglas built his company's first plane, a 2-seat, wood and fabric biplane he called the Cloudster. On 21 February, it became the first aircraft to get off the ground carrying weight exceeding its own. That helped attract the Navy's attention. But he needed money to build them. And that's when Davis backed out, apparently because he was tapped out - less than a year after signing on.

That left Douglas' fledgling enterprise a bit up in the air. As he struggled mightily to fulfill the Navy contract, Times Publisher Harry Chandler fashioned a parachute. InDouglas moved to an abandoned movie studio in Santa Monica and began making military planes. On 17 Marchhe made history when 8 Army airmen took off from Clover Field in 4 single-engine, open-cockpit Douglas World Cruisers.

They intended to circle the globe, but stopped by Seattle so they could designate it as their takeoff point. That would trim time off their journey - 2 weeks, as it turned out. The aviators flew into sandstorms, driving rain, Arctic winds and, once, a mountain. Two planes crashed, but no one died. The two remaining aircraft returned to Clover Field 28, miles and days later, having gone round the world and sealed Douglas Aircraft's reputation.

There werepeople waiting to greet them. Eleven years later, Douglas built the civilian DC for Douglas Commercial models, revolutionising air travel as an undertaking for ordinary passengers, not just the daring. The aircraft made its maiden voyage from Santa Monica. Douglas held on through the Depression, expanding Clover Field. But a world war loomed, sending him and his production line into overdrive.

By now fiercely competitive with Los Angeles' 7 other major aircraft manufacturers, Douglas was forced to suppress his competitive spirit and play nicely with his competitors. The companies, which included Northrop and Lockheed, were required to combine operations temporarily to meet wartime demand. He hated it, but went along for the duration.

Inas a morale booster for his employees, who were already cranking out warplanes and working round-the-clock shifts, he opened the Aero Theater on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica. He kept it operating at all hours so his workers and the public could enjoy brand new Abbott and Costello comedies and other Hollywood releases. He didn't wait for the government to protect him; he took the controls.

Douglas asked his chief engineer and test pilot, Frank Collbohm, and a renowned architect, H Roy Kelley, to devise a way to camouflage the plant. Later, Collbohm would found Rand Corporation and Kelley would design its headquarters. The bottom half centre of this photo actually conceals Douglas Aircraft with streets of burlap and trees with chicken-feather leaves.

Together with Warner Bros studio set designers, they made the plant and airstrip disappear - at least from the air. Almost 5 million square feet of chicken wire, stretched across tall poles, canopied the terminal, hangars, assorted buildings and parking lots. Atop the mesh stood lightweight wood-frame houses with attached garages, fences, clotheslines, even "trees" made of twisted wire and chicken feathers spray-painted to look like leaves.

Tanker trucks spewed green paint on the runway to simulate a field of grass. Streets and sidewalks were painted on the covering to blend into the adjacent Sunset Park neighborhood of modest homes that housed Douglas employees. The tallest hangar was made to look like a gently sloping hillside neighborhood. A fake house of plywood perched on tall pilings with a walkway across the burlap which covered the aircraft plant below.

Designers even matched up the painted streets with real ones. When they were done, the area was so well disguised that pilots had a hard time finding Clover Field. Some of them landed at nearby airstrips instead, protesting that someone had moved the field. Douglas adapted. When planes were due, he stationed men at each end of the runway to wave red flags like matadors.