Drinkwater, Harry, 1919-2014

Harry W. Drinkwater was born in Bakersfield, California on March 28, 1919 and grew up in Yountville, in one of the area's only Black families. At around age 13 he left his family and headed south to San Diego, Los Angeles, and Venice, but returned to Yountville in 1938 to finish high school. He joined the service in 1942 and was stationed in Weymouth, England as part an all-Black unit of the communication corps. At the very end of his tour of duty a turn at the camera during the shooting of his company's group photograph provided his first encounter with the possibilities of photography.

After the war, Drinkwater returned to Bakersfield but eventually made his way to Los Angeles, where he worked odd jobs, before joining the Civilian Conservation Corps, working at the Mexico-United States border near Tecate. From 1947 to 1949, Drinkwater used the G. I. Bill to attend the Fred Archer School of Photography, which had been founded in part to train veterans. Archer, who worked early on in the pictorialist style, had also been a movie studio photographer and an early proponent of advertising photography. His curriculum, which prepared veterans for work in commercial photography, joined formal experimentation with Hollywood film-style portraiture.

Following his graduation from Archer, Drinkwater worked for the Black community-based newspapers The Eagle (1947 to 1949) and The Sentinel (1949 to 1955), and for Elegant: The Magazine for Fashionable Living in the 1960s. In the 1950s, he also worked for Kelsey Screens, manufacturers of shoji-type screens, before becoming the primary photographer (1958-1961) for the modernist landscape architect, Garret Eckbo, whose Kandinsky-esque garden designs were influential in the development of mid-century architectural design. Although Drinkwater's negatives, as work-for-hire, were retained by Eckbo, his photographs are featured in Eckbo's books Urban Landscape Design (1964) and The Landscape We See (1969).

From the time he first picked up a camera in the late 1940s Drinkwater never stopped photographing. His work, at times quite stylized, belongs to a mid-century scene that is linked to Los Angeles's jazz, Beatnik, and modernist movements. Drinkwater's subjects ranged from art and architecture, to interior and landscape design, and to popular culture. He documented the changing cultural landscapes of Venice and Los Angeles, photographing Black artists and their work, as well as aspects of the area's wider artistic and social circles.

Drinkwater photographed the work of contemporary Los Angeles designers including that of his close friend, John Smith, who created the interiors of John Lautner's Chemosphere house. For the landmark 1966 exhibition 66 Signs of Neon, the first large-scale artistic response to the 1965 Watts Riots, Drinkwater worked with artist Noah Purifoy to photograph works for its exhibition catalogue Junk Art: 66 Signs of Neon. He also documented the work of Los Angeles artists such as DeWain Valentine and Gordon Wagner.

Drinkwater lived in Venice, California for over six decades, where he was both a fixture and chronicler of the area's vibrant arts scene. He died in 2014 at the age of 95.