Double Vision: The Photography of George Rodriguez

Hardcover, 192 pages
9.5 11.75 in.
24.13 29.845 cm.

The first ever career retrospective of Los Angeles photographer George Rodriguez.

Since the 1950s, Rodriguez has quietly documented multiple social worlds--in California and beyond--that have never before been displayed together, a rare mix of Hollywood and Chicano L.A., film premieres and farmworker strikes, album covers and street scenes, celebrity portraits and civil rights marches.

Throughout the 1960s and 70s, Rodriguez, raised in South Los Angeles, led something of a double life as a photographer. He worked for film studios, record labels, and magazines like Tiger Beat, processing film for Hollywood photographers and shooting countless photographs of the era's biggest music and film stars, while also photographing the social movements and protests that were exploding on the streets of Los Angeles and throughout the country: the East Los Angeles Walkouts, the Chicano Moratorium, the United Farm Workers movement, the Sunset Strip riots, among others.

Double Vision explores both of these worlds alongside the many other urban scenes Rodriguez has shot over the years, from L.A. gang graffiti and boxing to early hip-hop. A student of Sid Avery and a contemporary of Dennis Hopper, Rodriguez is one of the great visual documentarians of Los Angeles and of the cultural complexities of Mexican-American life.

Assembled by Rodriguez himself, in conjunction with scholar and writer Josh Kun, this book will be an invaluable addition to the way we understand identity, popular culture, and civil rights in American life, and a visual biography of one of the country's most important, yet unsung, visual historians.

Edited and with texts by Josh Kun
Forewords by Dolores Huerta and John Densmore
Designed by Brian Roettinger
Hat & Beard Press #12