Joe Deal

Diamond Bar is a new community of housing developments and shopping centers at the eastern edge of Los Angeles County with no apparent plan, history, or evidence of regional influences from older neighboring communities. Diamond Bar has, almost all at once, been carved out of the hillsides surrounding an intersection of two major freeways.

The houses of any given development within the community are, relatively undifferentiated and, prior to being occupied, seem to share a yard which is all of one piece, scraped clean as a result of mountain cropping, clearing and leveling the land.

For my contribution to the Los Angeles Survey Project, I chose to photograph Diamond Bar because it is one of the newest outposts in the network of communities connected by freeways characteristic of the manner in which Los Angeles has evolved. More particularly, I chose to survey recently occupied houses and back yards in Diamond Bar as the most recent expressions of a new landscape, given its broader outlines by developers and filled in and particularized, not necessarily according to any known conventions, by the residents.

Within this brief survey, an attempt was made to show this collaboration at varying stages nearing completion, and in as many various individual types.   - Joe Deal, Camera Magazine, February, 1981