D.J. Waldie Selected Works

A collection drawing on history, memory, and critical analysis that illuminates how Angelenos have seen themselves and their city. In Waldie’s exploration of sprawling Los Angeles, he considers how the city's image was constructed and how it fostered willful amnesia about the city's conflicted past. 

Since its publication in 1996, Holy Land has become an American classic. In "quick, translucent prose" (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times) that is at once lyrical and unsentimental, D. J. Waldie recounts growing up in Lakewood, California, a prototypical post-World War II suburb. Laid out in 316 sections as carefully measured as a grid of tract houses, Holy Land is by turns touching, eerie, funny, and encyclopedic in its handling of what was gained and lost when thousands of blue-collar families were thrown together in the suburbs of the 1950s. An intensely realized and wholly original memoir about the way in which a place can shape a life, Holy Land is ultimately about the resonance of choices—how wide a street should be, what to name a park—and the hopes that are realized in the habits of everyday life.

Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles is the second book by D.J. Waldie, one of the most gifted writers on the American scene. As Patt Morrison notes in her foreword, "The suburb is America's lifeline and its punchline, and Waldie is its bard." Few observers can present the facts of everyday life with the texture and emotion of a symphony, the way Waldie does. A breathtaking progression from his much-celebrated book Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, Where We Are Now is a compilation of Waldie's most intriguing recent works and an exploration of the meaning of place in Los Angeles, long regarded as the most placeless of American cities.

A luxurious, graphically compelling vision for contemporary domestic living, as observed and artfully presented by the Oscar-winning film star.

House is Diane Keaton’s stunning portrayal of the way we may and do live now, in rusticated, reimagined, or repurposed spaces across the country. Inventive designers, including Annabelle Selldorf, Roy McMakin, Rick Joy, and Tom Kundig, have brought their talents to bear upon the structurally old, the disused, and the antiquated, finding in these buildings the hidden beauty that lies beneath the surface of neglect and decay, and through their work revealing to us the many possibilities we might bring to our own domestic spaces. Through innovative design and repurposing, industrial structures and farm buildings, crumbling commercial lofts and rusting hangars are transformed and vividly revealed as thoroughly engaging spaces for living. House presents a graphically striking vision, frequently marked by strong geometries and primal coloration, that ignites the imagination of those intent upon redefining the possible as it pertains to one’s space—work that is joyous and rooted in our most basic understandings of home. Text by D.J. Waldie.

California Romantica features the most important, yet rarely seen, residential exemplars of the California Mission and Spanish Colonial styles, by such noted architects as George Washington Smith, Wallace Neff, Richard Requa, Lilian Rice, and Paul R. Williams, among others. From whitewashed stucco walls and cloistered patios to tile roofs and sumptuous gardens, each house shown is a rare masterpiece, splendidly appointed with authentic Monterey furniture, California tile, and Navajo rugs. Among the magnificent seaside estates, canyon villas, and courtyard bungalows shown is Diane Keaton’s former home in Beverly Hills, which she thoughtfully restored with noted designer Stephen Shadley, and for which she has been recognized as a committed preservationist. She brings her cinematic eye, a keen sense of natural drama, and a profound appreciation for the nuances of shadow and light to the elucidation of these buildings, through the selection of specially commissioned photography. Authoritative text by D. J. Waldie lucidly explicates the architecture and provides an intimate tour of a historic and distinctly Californian lifestyle.

A Siamese cat beneath a clothes line, three women with linked arms standing on the front lawn, a man drying his hands on a dish towel in front of the kitchen stove. These scenes are part of Close to Home and the accompanying Getty Museum exhibition held from October 12, 2004 to January 16, 2005, which celebrate snapshots—"found" photographs by anonymous photographers—that capture everyday life in all of its joy, banality, and mystery. Taken between 1930 and the mid-1960s, these photographs, most of them in black-and-white, create an unpretentious portrait of suburban American life by untrained photographers whose images can be unexpectedly lyrical and moving. Complementing the photographs is an essay by noted Southern California writer D. J. Waldie. The snapshot, Waldie writes, "depending on who's doing the looking, is horrifying, hilarious, pointless, or suffused with yearning." Waldie speculates on the meanings and implications of the snapshots in this book and of snapshots generally, which he sees as expressions of "the hunger of memory."

One of the most visited real cities in the world, Los Angeles is a place with many centers, but none are more drenched in history and diversity than its Downtown. Photographs by Marissa Roth, accompanied by text by D.J. Waldie.