After my lecture at Cal State Northridge back in November 2024, someone in the audience asked what places I'd still like to document? I gave some vague answer at the time, but after really thinking about it, I remembered all kinds of places that I have tacked to my wall above my desk. Once you've been photographing for HABS/HAER for a while, you start to find things you'd like to shoot but no project that requires it. Some of the places aren't historic yet, some are funky, some temporary, and some are off limits. But what good is a HABS bucket list if it's not aspirational.
MY LIST
The International Space Station
Gitmo. (Naval Station Guantánamo Bay and Guantánamo Bay detention camp, Cuba)
HABS of historic ice fishing shanties in Wisconsin
WWII American Cemeteries in Philippines
All remaining electric chairs and gas chambers
Hope Houses (Basement Houses)
Diablo Canyon and San Onofre nuclear power plants
The Matterhorn in Anaheim
SS Encinitas and SS Moonlight (732-36 3rd Street Encinitas)
Stanford Linear Accelerator (while it is running)
HALS of all of Broadway in Los Angeles
HABS addendum of Angel's Flight Railway
I've already taken a few of the photographs of places that weren't 'required' documentations or mitigations. Like the Top Hat Hot Dog Stand, the ubiquitous Fotomat Kiosk, Bixby Bridge near Big Sur, the Kaufman Desert House in Palm Springs, Death Row at San Quentin, the Sea Shadow secret stealth ship, and the Olivas Adobe in my home town of Ventura. But every now and then I'll drive by some ephemeral architecture and think, That's gonna be gone before it's historic."
In my opinion, one of the blind spots of the HABS/HAER/HALS program is that, by design, it only ever looked backward, and there are some things that, while worthy and history-making, have never lasted long enough to be seen in the proverbial rear-view mirror.
Places eminently threatened by sea-level rise or wildfires should probably be short-listed for documentation before they are damaged or lost, but that's not the way HABS is set up. HABS has never had to document events or the American zeitgeist, that was the FSA's job. While the Farm Security Administration (FSA) had a 1930s mandate to photograph the 'historical' events and places that now serve as our collective visual memory of life in the Great Depression, HABS was likewise established with a clear mandate to just draw historic buildings. While photographers were integral to HABS field-survey 'squads' from day one, HABS was formed by architects to employ architects, and the photographers were (and are still) subsidiary. While photography and written histories have gained much more prominence since the early days when the drawing program began, the Heritage Documentation Program has always been administered as drawing-centric and architect-dominant.
HABS is the greatest documentation program ever conceived, but it was conceived to last eight weeks and not nine decades, and I believe it's healthy to step back and insert some constructive criticism every now and then. Places like the Stanford Linear Accelerator might be documented by HABS in fifty or sixty years after they're abandoned or before being demolished, but the record would be so much more accurate with all the scientists and functional equipment in use. Why not document them in full swing, at the height of their relevance? Maybe it's homeless encampments, Olympic villages, or pop-up Covid test centers but some of this stuff may not make it to 50-years-old and may never get honestly documented for the public now that the FSA is gone and there is no replacement government project of its kind to record events or life in America in 2025.
Maybe we can hope magazines, Youtube videos, and social media posts will democratically do the recording for us with quantity as a substitute for quality, but I have my doubts about their long term veracity and reliability in a era where every image is retouched and the AI sausage-making machine can create visuals out of thin air. Significant places (and some historic events) will change and disappear without triggering mitigations; we don't have to document everything, but some truly significant stuff should probably be on our collective To Do list.
If you’d like more information about HABS, HAER or HALS photography take a look at the HABS FAQ page of our website.
Stephen Schafer, HABS/HAER/HALS Photography,
Ventura, California
Phone: 415-857-HAER
E: schaf@west.net