A captivating photograph of a black bear appearing to smile while overlooking Pasadena has become a viral sensation on social media. The image, captured by Los Angeles wildlife photographer Johanna Turner, highlights the proximity of wildlife to urban areas in California.

In an exclusive interview with Pasadena Now, Turner, who lives in Reseda and has friends in the Pasadena area with private property where she has cameras set up, shared her inspiration behind the photograph. 

“I’m always looking for ways to show how close wildlife is to Los Angeles and the city,” she explained. “This spot is a ridge line that as I’ve hiked it, I’ve seen a lot of animal tracks, so I know that animals use it and the view lends itself perfectly to the kind of image I’m trying to get.”

Turner’s initial interest in the spot was to photograph mountain lions, which are her favorite subject. She set up her trail camera, a regular Canon handheld camera with a motion sensor, on April 21. The camera uses a long exposure, with the shutter open for about 30 seconds, and only triggers once when an animal approaches, unlike camera traps that take a burst of photos. 

“The animal approaching triggers the camera to go off and a person is nowhere near. I am at home in bed when the photo gets taken,” she said.

While there wasn’t much wildlife activity over the winter due to cold and rainy conditions, Turner noted that now that springtime is here, the animals are definitely up and about. She also mentioned that wildlife will be roaming everywhere this spring because of the water availability in streams and canyons from a good rainy winter, as opposed to drought conditions.

The bear’s relaxed appearance in the photograph has caught the attention of many. “It’s the relaxed face, which people take it as a smile, which is not really something a bear would be walking around smiling in the middle of the night, but that’s what catches our eye because that’s a familiar look,” Turner noted. 

“But to that point, this is a very relaxed animal who’s healthy and not stressed.”

Turner’s work aims to raise awareness about the diverse wildlife in the San Gabriel Mountains, including mountain lions, bobcats, gray foxes, striped skunks, and several kinds of owls.

“What I hope to do is show people what we have because they might not be aware how beautiful and great and how rich in wildlife our mountains are,” she said.

As bears become more active this spring, Turner believes that fostering a connection with these animals can help prevent conflicts. 

“I believe that the more we can have a connection with an animal and see them as beautiful or valuable rather than a pest, people will be more likely to take steps to keep their trash secured and not leave food outside that would attract bears and get them into trouble,” she explained.

Turner collaborates with conservation groups such as the Cougar Conservancy and Arroyos and Foothills Conservancy to identify and preserve critical wildlife corridors. She also sells her wildlife photos and contributes a portion of the proceeds to various animal conservation groups. 

“We’re working on identifying where animals are crossing and preserving that land before it gets pinched off and preventing that natural flow,” she said.

A snapshot of history recently landed in Andrej Baca’s lap.

In March, the Sandycove Acres resident agreed to take an extensive collection — more than 30 pieces in all — of cameras, lenses and flashes off the hands of a friend, whose husband had built it up before he died three years ago. 

Baca runs a camera club at the retirement community. So while he appreciates and admires the legacy these cameras left before the dawn of the digital photography era, his role here is that of steward, to ensure this equipment finds a good, permanent home — whether that’s in a business display, man cave or museum. 

“I cannot imagine how many people, hearts and occasions were captured and shared,” Baca said. “(I’m) not a collector, but am fascinated in the quality, ruggedness, durability and weight of old things. Handmade, not cloned or stamped out by the (thousands).”

These temporarily inherited cameras, which span nearly half a century of history, include Fujifilm, Nikon L135, Kodak Brownie, Konica, Polaroid Land Camera, Olympus and Minolta Pocket Autopak models. 

Most were donated by people in Sandycove.

“The display started out with a few cameras, and in a few years grew as digital became the camera to own,” Baca said. “Once tablets and phones came into acceptance by the general population, standalone entry level cameras faded out. (With) larger image sensors and interchangeable lenses, pro digital cameras outperform the very small image sensors with many millions of pixels found in phones and tablets. So now what to do with years of evolution, thousands of dollars in cameras and lenses, that many think should be trashed?”

Anyone interested in obtaining some of this equipment can contact Baca at [email protected].

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At WSLS, we are committed to informing and delighting our audience. In our commitment to covering our communities with innovation and excellence, we incorporate Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies to enhance our news gathering, reporting, and presentation processes. Read our article to see how we are using Artificial Intelligence.

Review & Photography by: Diane Fleischman

Her husband died a long time ago. Twenty years already, nearly a lifetime by now, but also, it seems, right around the corner, just one street back. For so long, and even sometimes still, she has lived parallel lives — the one robbed from her when he died, and the one which circumstances were forcing her to create. But how do you let go of a life of love and companionship and the sense of self, all that came of it.?

She awoke each day, conflicted. She wanted her husband to have lived. She wanted what she had loved. She wanted to get better, feel better, move forward. And she wanted the same for her sons. Yet sometimes, when she tried to move forward, it felt like she was having an affair on her husband, her family. She was not, she reasoned, because he was dead. But still.

At the time, she was working in human resources for Apple, doing a lot of work around changing organizations and the lives that went with them, when she read a personal book by someone with a parallel story to hers. The thesis explored how to embrace that liminal time when your world has changed dramatically, when your identity, your sense of self has become altered. The question and the answer, she found, lay in leveraging the experience as a way to grow en route to the other side of the story.

“Finally, I thought, ‘You know what? I’m going to embrace this period and come out stronger.’ And so I did,” she said, “trying on all these different personas, some real, some imagined, while learning how to bring my previous person and life along with me to live a parallel life with who I was becoming.”

One of her first steps forward lay in landing a red purse at a school fundraising auction. She loved that designer bag, less for what it was or how it looked, and more for what it meant. It was feminine, fashionable, extravagant — representing all the conventional elements of the feminine mystique. She had to have it, still less for what it was and more for the permission it gave her to lift into a different persona than the one weighing her down.

Jacque Rupp bought the bag.

The red purse became a prop for the photographer who has spent her life using imagery to both portray and interpret her story. And the evocative, provocative, devastating, seductive, sad photographs, largely of herself, paired with her prose, create a tale we can neither turn from nor stop reading. Particularly, the parts where we find something of ourselves there.

The result is “The Red Purse: A story of grief and desire.” Published in winter 2023 by Daylight Community Arts Foundation, and presented in hardcover, surfaced in red silk, the artisanal book is available at Ami Carmel and at the Center for Photographic Art (CFA), both in Carmel.

“I remember the first time the red purse made an appearance in a photograph,” wrote CFA Executive Director Ann Jastrab, in an Afterword for the book. “It seemed tame compared to the lace undergarment worn by the woman carrying it … She was beautiful, she was reckless, she was lost, she was aging. She was unstoppable, too, because there’s power in pain, even when we don’t know it.”

Rupp also understood she had found the portal that would both inspire and enable her to reimagine her life, to pair her abilities to create a kind of “film noir in book form.”

“I also knew, in the story I was developing through photography, and the words paired with it, that it had to be real, it had to be my story. I found myself comfortable seeing the beauty, the gift inherent in death, and embracing that. I grieved my loss, yet I also found myself forced into situations where I became comfortable enough with the subject that I was allowed to do widowhood in a different way.”

Coming of age in a dark room

Rupp has framed her life through photography since she was a high school student in Woodstock, New York, sequestered in the dark room. At 16, and emerging from a tough childhood, she found the space a special place to be.

“Photography has always been important to me, therapeutic even; I’ve always tapped into it,” she said, “when having a rough time.”

A fan of both color and black-and-white photography, Rupp was working in black and white when using film, yet upon entering the digital era, she switched to color, which she finds both more difficult and less forgiving.

“Still,” she said, “I like both. Sometimes, when I love an image but it’s not working in color, I switch to black and white, and it works.”

Before the pandemic, Rupp was traveling the world, taking workshops and photographing the people she encountered, having learned early that photography can be a wonderful way to kindle relationships.

Once COVID curtailed travel and Rupp was sheltering in place, she turned her attention and her camera to her personal project. Today, she divides her life between Los Altos and Carmel.

“I went from being a caged animal and then, all of a sudden, my energy and inspiration started flowing and I was released. The pandemic was a time for introspection for all of us, a calmness with it. I never would have done this if I had not been on my own, stuck inside a house.”

In addition to Rupp’s perspective, “The Red Purse” presents an Afterword by American photographer Jason Langer, known for his mysterious and noir portrayals of moments in urban life.

“The Red Purse,” he wrote, “is about what happens next. Through a series of photographic tableaux, photographer Jacque Rupp poses a series of  ‘what if’ questions about the choices she made or could have made after the passing of her husband. These are not pictures about grief. The Red Purse is about renewal, perseverance, and harnessing the power of desire to carve a new path after the loss of a life partner. It is about giving permission to rediscover oneself, try on different personae, and beginning anew.”

Additional perspective is presented through a conversation between Rupp and Elinor Carucci, an Israeli-American photographer, living in New York City, widely recognized for her intimate photographic portrayals of her family and others of renown.

“Elinor was my mentor for the past years,” Rupp said. “An established photographer with the New York Times, she photographed Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Collars. At the end of my book, I shared our conversation as a way to weave her into the story.”

Rupp sees herself not as a writer but as a visual storyteller, who uses the camera to clarify and express what she thinks, feels, and sees. In this case, she is focused on loss and rebuilding, creating new identities, new possibilities, particularly in the face of ageism.

“Older women, divorcees, widowed women—we need to have more conversation about who we have been and who we are becoming,” she said. “We all do it differently, and that’s fine, as long as we still see ourselves. I want my photography and my work to have impact, to make a difference. It’s about social impacts and personal sense of self.”

Photo Credit: Yonatan Sindel/Flash90

Gershon Elinson, the legendary photographer of Gush Etzion passed away on Saturday, May 11, 2024, at the age of 75. Besides being famous for his 45 years of photography, Elinson was one of the first settlers in the city of Hebron. He then later lived in Efrat.

The mayor of the Gush Etzion Regional Council, Yaron Rosenthal, delivered a eulogy for Elinson:

“Our friend, the photographer, Gershon Elinson, of Efrat, passed away on Shabbat.

Gershon was a photographer who followed development of the communities in Judea almost from the beginning of their inception.

He documented the beginnings of the community in Ir Avot. He settled in Efrat and photographed the town since its establishment. Throughout the past decades, he attended every event held in Gush Etzion.

Officially, he was our photographer, but whoever knew him, knew that he was, above all, a true soldier of our communities. He regarded it his mission to tell the story of our communities on this good mountain, through the lens of his camera.

Gush Etzion owes much to him, and with God’s help, we shall find a way to salute and recognize him.

He was a true friend to me for many years.

I shall miss him very much.”

Some of Gershon’s photos:

Posted: 12th May, 2024 by The Editor

Making over two decades of music, The Decemberists have truly stamped their style into the indie rock cannon. Their instrumentals and vocals have only progressed and tuned since their first LP in 2003. Their latest three singles have only proven that the band is comfortable in their style, but continue to keep up with new and interesting sounds. Alongside The Decemberists, were Chicago-based up-and-comers, Ratboys. Taking influence from early 2000’s indie darlings, the band has also bloomed into their signature sound. The two bands together are a perfect sonic pairing. Jay caught the two at their show in Philly and took some amazing photos from the night. Check them out!

Photos by Jay Leiby

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