Capturing Los Angeles & Lowriders with Valerie J. Bower

Years before she was self-publishing photo books and zines, Bower studied photography at Narbonne High School in Harbor City, where it was a requirement for students to take an art elective. A freshman at the time, she opted to take the class because it sounded relatively easy and her friends were also enrolled. Her favorite thing about the course was being allowed to “walk around the school while everyone else was in class,” she laughs during a recent Zoom call. It was there that she learned how to shoot with manual cameras and develop film in a dark room. 

She practiced taking photos with a manual ‘80s Canon camera that her father gave her before upgrading to a Minolta x-700 camera––a $40 steal her dad found at a local swap meet. 

After years of experimenting with her personal photography style, Bower began to discover her aesthetic in 2015, around the same time her eldest brother introduced her to the world of lowrider shows. As she frequented more of the car shows, her images embodied an increasingly soft and feminine approach to the traditionally gritty and masculine subjects she was shooting. And as she watched vibrant El Caminos and ‘64 Impalas bounce and defy gravity, she elected to shoot in black and white. She wanted to highlight what she thought to be the star of the show: the people. 

“I kind of saw it again with these new fresh eyes and I was like, ‘Oh shit. There’s something to photograph here,’” Bower says. “For what I wanted to show, the color was irrelevant. I want [people] to focus more on the feeling and the person and what’s happening rather than being distracted by color.” 

In 2015 at the first Long Beach Zine Fest, Bower showed her lowrider photo series, along with her Blue Line zine project, a compilation of images of everyday people and things she saw while taking the metro train that stretches from Downtown Long Beach to Downtown LA. Her vendor table was decorated with candy-pink butcher paper. 

“I feel like it really popped and people were like ‘What is this?’” Bower recalls. “I don’t think anybody had ever really seen [this kind of content] presented like that before.” 

Locals also connected with Bower’s images of “rough neighborhoods” which all too often aren’t reflected in a positive or artistic light. 

“I want to document [these neighborhoods] because they are rapidly changing,” Bower says about the LA County areas she focuses on, which are quickly becoming more gentrified. “My work is part documentation for historical purposes, but then it’s also trying to give light to these communities that people tend to look over.” For her, it’s fulfilling when she can remind locals to “feel proud of where they’re from,” she added. 

When lowrider shows came to a screeching halt and the streets of LA emptied last year in the wake of COVID-19, Bower shifted her focus to documenting essential workers of the past and present. In her 90-page zine titled We Are Essential Mahalaga Tayo, she paid homage to food distributors, farmworkers and the Manongs of Central California in the 1920s-1970s. She also drove to Delano–about 150 miles north of LA–to photograph the grape farms and historic Filipino Community Hall, where much of the 1965 Delano Grape Strike organizing took place. We Are Essential Mahalaga Tayo, which was a part of The Music Center’s For the Love of LA art series, was Bower’s first zine project that highlighted her Filipino heritage.

“That project was really eye-opening for me,” Bower says. As she did the research for the zine, she also had conversations with her mother  (who immigrated to California from Butuan, Philippines) about the roots and significance of food in Filipino culture. “It was just important to not only shoot the workers and the people,” she adds, “but I also tried to make a point of iconizing these markets and areas.”

With her latest photo series, Take Care released on February 4, she also reflects on the troubling times of 2020––though she stresses that it’s not a quarantine zine. The images, all taken in Long Beach, were printed in black and gray, giving them an eerie vibe. She inverted the photos as an analogy of how the world felt at the time, she said. 

Throughout the pandemic, Bower has been making her most intimate work yet, by turning the camera onto herself and her boyfriend of eight years, Nathan.

“It’s been a challenge,” she says, confessing that she’s not a “selfie queen.” “It’s forced me to be a little bit more involved in my work rather than shooting subjects from a distance. I kind of like that some things are becoming more personal in that way because as we get older, I’m going to change. My face is going to change. My hair is going to change. I want to document that because it’s for my own archive.” 

During a recent conversation, Bower, who does administrative work on the side, realized that she’s already been living her dream as a photographer.  

“I really love the process of bookmaking and zine-making, and being able to share my work that way,” she offers. “If I don’t do any more shows and I’m just doing books, I’ll be super happy. I just want to keep doing it.” 

To learn more about Valerie J. Bower or to purchase her zines, visit her website.