A photo story by Temi Lawson

Produced by Temi Lawson & Arnold Lawson

Photography: Temi Lawson

Edited by: Arnold Lawson

This project started as a portrait session with Barbara, a friend I met online through school in 2020 and was finally meeting in person for the first time. We shot along Manhattan Beach before making our way to Bruce's Beach, a small plot of land with a history worth knowing. In the 1920s, a Black couple named the Bruces built a resort there that became a real gathering place for the Black community, until racist harassment and arson drove them out and the city seized the land. It sat undeveloped for decades before it was finally returned to the Bruce family's descendants, in the years following the national reckoning after George Floyd's murder. I wanted this shoot to hold that history rather than pass by it, a portrait session that became a way of asking what's actually behind the picture.