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In 1958, Nat Mendelsohn, a professor of sociology of Czech origin, acquired 82,000 acres of land in the Mojave Desert, about 160 km north of Los Angeles, and founded the optimistic California City. Intended to compete with LA in terms of importance, California City was just one of the countless well-prepared communities that sprang up in the state during the boom years that followed the Second World War. But unlike Irvine or Mission Viejo, California City never took off. Although it is officially the third largest city in California due to its geographic size, today it has a population of just under 15,000, many of whom work in the California Penitentiary Center. It only remains the ozymandian vision of Mendelsohn, it's a vast grid of empty, mostly unpaved streets carved into the desert landscape – a ghostly suburb that looks from above to the remnants of An ancient civilization.
"It has been touted as an extravagant development, but in many ways it has failed dramatically," said Chicago-based photographer Noritaka Minami, who first discovered the city of California while 39, he attended the doctoral school of UC Irvine. It turns out that few people wanted to live in the middle of the desert, miles away from the road and hours of the nearest city. When Mendelsohn finally sold and sold his shares in the city in 1969, he managed to attract only 1,300 people to his future metropolis. "Many people bought land there without visiting," says Minami. "If they were really gone, they would have realized how far it is."
Minami was intrigued by the name of California City and the fact that, even though he had lived in that state for over a decade, he had never heard of it. He began photographing the city from the ground, then a helicopter, focusing on the uninhabited part of the "second community" of the city, which is subdivided into tens of thousands of virgin lands connected by unpaved dirt roads . (Although they have never been developed, the streets all have a name and appear on Google Maps.) After experimenting with different devices and film media, Minami opted for a medium format camera and a monochromatic support granular reflecting the relief of the landscape.
The photographs perfectly illustrate the harsh beauty of the desert, which continues to attract strong migrants to California City, many of them looking for the same quality – the isolation of civilization – that l & rsquo; Has prevented from achieving the grandiose dreams of Mendelsohn. "It's very quiet, and some people are attracted to it," says Minami. "There is just not enough interest in developing a major community."
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