Photography of The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner Building is part of the LAC+USC Medical Center campus in Lincoln Heights.
Historic Preservation
Preserving Los Angeles Book
Preserving Los Angeles – How Historic Places Can Transform America’s Cities – A book by author Ken Bernstein, photographed by Stephen Schafer.
Using Online Aerial Maps for Photo Scouting, Preservation and HABS/HAER/HALS
Check out this fun video for great tips on researching historic sites, preservation advocacy, and photography related info gathering.
Nomination Photographs for the Watts Coffee House and Mafundi Center
On November 5th, 2020 – during the Covid 19 pandemic – I volunteered for a day of documentation photography in Watts to support the nomination of the Watts Happening Cultural Center and the Mafundi Mural located at East 103rd Street in Los Angeles. It was a sunny day working with Rita Cofield and the staff…
Preserving Los Angeles
Preserving Los Angeles, highlighting dozens of lesser-known buildings, neighborhoods, and places in every corner of the city that have been “found” by SurveyLA, the first-ever city-wide survey of Los Angeles’ historic resources. The text is richly illustrated through images by a prominent architectural photographer, Stephen Schafer.
2020 – The Year We Blow Past 100 Documentations
A little list of the HABS, HAER, and HALS documentations Schaf Photo has competed in the past 10+ years…
CEQA Documentation Mitigations for Historic (Cultural) Resources
The example below is a CEQA compliant Level 2 HABS mitigation for a significant historic district, campus, farmstead or any multi-unit grouping of resources. This example follows the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Architectural, Engineering and Landscape Documentation.
Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) Highlights: First Over Glendale Bridge 2016
Here’s some highlights from my Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) documentation of the First Street Viaduct over Glendale Boulevard from October, 2016.
Photographer’s Eye: Capturing History Forever, Photographing for the Historic American Buildings Survey
HABS, as the Historic American Buildings Survey is informally called, is arguably the best documentation program in the world for historic buildings. Stephen Schafer has been practicing this archival photographic process to capture sites in California as diverse as an 1840s adobe and a Cold-War stealth ship.
HABS/HAER/HALS Documentations from 2017 and 2018
A selection of my favorite large format negatives from the last couple years of Historic American Buildings Survey photography (HABS). By Stephen Schafer, Ventura, California, (805)-652-1000