Inner visions
Elisa Parhad’s ‘Guide for the Eyes’ series seeks the source of a place’s soul
By Joanna Beresford 09/03/2009
As Elisa Parhad spoke to me by phone from her Silver Lake home this week, she described huge plumes of smoke erupting over the mountains. The sun was bright pink, she said, glowing through a murky haze, even on a Sunday morning near the end of summer. The air quality in Pasadena was extremely hazardous that day. I was spending the weekend in the desert, but I watched flames engulfing various landscapes, consuming property and driving people from their homes, in the modern way — alternately online, at my desk and from the kitchen counter.
I met Elisa, before the fires started, in Distant Lands — not a geographical location, per se, but the bookstore and outfitters on South Raymond Avenue in Old Pasadena. She was talking about her recently published book, “New Mexico: A Guide for the Eyes.” The New Mexico book is the first in a series of guides Elisa’s planning. The series is “intended for travelers and locals who wish to familiarize themselves with the everyday details that make up the soul of a place,” Elisa writes in her preface. Specifically, she explores “local symbols, folk art, traditions, land formations, foods … that are seen repeatedly throughout an environment.”
On the phone, Elisa told me she’s interested in the identity of place, the natural and manmade themes that define a place. She studied anthropology and international business in college but thinks she should have focused on cultural geography instead. She says that her next project will explore the soul, if you will, of Southern California.
Now, some people don’t think Southern California has a soul — one of my brothers, for instance, who has traveled the world, but who still lives in a working-class suburb of Cleveland, not far from farmland and railroad tracks rusted by rain and snow but still clattering with activity. I think it’s the cracks in the sidewalks where the grass grows through, and the evidence of poverty and resourcefulness and resilience that you see when you drive into the city, past tenement housing, smokestacks and Orthodox church domes, to reach the East side — and there, too, where the art museum and the Cleveland Orchestra and several universities contrast with leaden skies and industrial terrain. I think it’s that passage that has convinced my brother that his is a distinctly soulful city.
But I digress. Besides which, I think Elisa can find the soul in any place she encounters, not just because she’s a muse of places, but because the soulfulness is there, everywhere.
The city of Pasadena will “feature heavily” in “Southern California: A Guide for the Eyes,” according to Elisa. Her grandmother lived in Pasadena during the 1930s and ’40s and she always portrayed the city to her wide-eyed progeny as a golden paradise. Pasadena, she told them, was the very essence of the rich and semi-tropical/semi-arid Neverland that lured people to Los Angeles from points north and east.
The iconic imagery that Elisa wants to depict when she represents Pasadena in her Southern California book hovers around seminal architecture. She’s drawn to the homes of Pasadena. She wants to photograph and write about California bungalows and the Arts and Crafts movement. She wants to include Greene & Greene, perhaps, and also the mixed heritage of citrus groves, the Rose Bowl and a thriving culture of live stand-up comedy, and the arts in general. Also, she may feel compelled to write about wildfires. And last spring she photographed the jacaranda trees in bloom around our valley.
One of my favorite sections in the New Mexico book is the one in which Elisa describes hogans. A traditional hogan “opens to the east to greet the sun,” she writes, “and is most commonly a one-room circular structure built of wood and mud. … Most also have a hole in the roof, to allow smoke from an interior fire to escape.” Because hogans were typically abandoned by a tribe after a family member’s death, or when moving on to new grazing areas, they typically weren’t designed to be permanent.
She’s a hogan, I thought, as Elisa addressed a room overflowing with patrons last week. That’s because she’s about eight months pregnant. She’s round, sturdy, beautiful, ceremonial, domestic, organic, provisional. And then later, when the fires raged, I reconsidered: everything is a hogan — necessary, but ultimately temporary.
Joanna Dehn Beresford can be reached at truewrite@yahoo.com.
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