California Dreaming Indeed
600-photo ‘Trip’ takes in more than just scenery

By Robert Taylor
Staff Writer, Contra Costa Times

1/27/2008

There are big picture books with names like “Beautiful California” and “Scenic California,” but that’s not what Richard Blair and Kathleen Goodwin had in mind. Their version, just published with 600 photographs filling 300 pages, is “California Trip.”

“It’s the first left-wing coffee-table book on California,” explain the Marin County couple, both writers and photographers. “California Trip” is no liberal tract, but it does include hippies, gay men and lesbians, political protesters and farmworkers among the stunning photographs of the Big Sur coast, Yosemite and San Francisco cable cars.

Blair arrived in California from New York in the 1960s, Goodwin from South Africa in the 1970s, and they’ve crisscrossed the state since then. In the 1980s and ‘90s, they ran a photo studio in Berkeley, which may help explain the book’s focus on multiple cultures and social change.

“California Trip” is a rambling documentary spanning nearly 40 years, from the tragic Altamont concert to the drama of Barry Bonds, from a dreamy almond orchard in Kern County to the 1991 fire in the Oakland-Berkeley hills.

Blair, who made most of the photographs, gives an edge to what might be merely scenic: The towering supports of an abandoned drive-in movie screen echo a plowed field in the Central Valley; bristlecone pines in the White Mountains, thousands of years old, look delicately sculpted; a couple in a rowboat on Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park seem to be in an idyllic European setting.

Beyond California scenery, there are plenty of people, too, from Grace Slick onstage at Altamont to nude sunbathers on the San Mateo coast to rodeo performers in Guerneville to face-painted children at Make-A-Circus in Oakland. It’s not just a picture postcard. As the title declares, it’s a trip.

“California Trip” can be ordered from bookstores or the publisher at 415-663-1615, http://www.pointreyesvisions.com.

Reach Robert Taylor at 925-977-8428 or rtaylor@bayareanewsgroup.com.
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