The popular Lo/Cal coffee shop on Pico Blvd is celebrating its 10 year anniversary by creating a photo gallery of all the regular customers with each portrait a stylish black and white, professionally snapped photo.
This has been made possible because of manager Steve Curley, who before taking a slightly different path, has spent most of his career as a professional photographer, cinematographer and location scout for various Hollywood studios.
Born in Manchester, England, Curley came to the US 30 years ago to find a career in photography, spending 10 years in New York first, then six in Chicago before finally settling in Los Angeles 10 years ago. He was living and working in Manhattan when 9/11 unfolded and he took some mindblowing photographs from that infamous day in history.
“Photograohy is my first love,” he says, “But I always had an interest in being involved with film and television too.”
However, Curley says that after a few years he began to become disheartened with industry, or more specifically, the “toxic environment” he was repeatedly finding himself in.
“The final straw was working on NBC’s Quantum Leap reboot,” he says, adding that budget cuts, exhaustive schedules and union bureaucracy caused him to rethink a few things. “So I became embittered with all the unions, all the bullshit, the scant work. It's terrible. At 53 I won't put up with that crap. I wanted to turn back to my photography.” Curley said.
That’s when he started hanging out at the Lo/Cal coffee shop. Inbetween freelance and contract jobs, Curley would spend time planning his next projects, gathering his thoughts and exchanging pleasantries with the other regular customers. One of those customers was Anne Carmack, Santa Monica’s Poet Laureate, who encouraged him to apply for the manager role when they saw a sign hanging on the wall one morning, advertising the role.
“I already knew the owner, he’s a great guy and so last year, I started working here and said goodbye to Hollywood,” Curley said. “I’d been coming here for years and I finally hopped over the counter, so to speak, because I love it here and I know everyone who comes in. It's like the good old fashioned community thing that I have been missing for years.”
This love of local life prompted Curley to suggest to the shop’s owner that for the 10th anniversary, they should produce a gallery of every regular customer willing to participate, in a gesture thanking the community for 10 years of business.
“On my days off, I would set up in the back, there’s a nice, little patio, but not much space, so I set up a backdrop and my lighting and then ask the customers very nicely if they wanted to take part,” he laughed.
Not everyone was thrilled by the idea straight away, but it didn’t take long for everyone to see the positive side of participation. He explained that there was one customer, a very large gentleman, who would come in everyday and spend three or four hours in the coffee shop.
“Sometimes we would even see him crying as he sat, but this is his safe space and he’s always friendly and helpful, but we would just leave him be … When we asked him, he wasn’t interested at all,” Curley said.
“About three hours passed and then he got up, walked right up to me – he has no idea about personal space – and I thought I was going to get pounded for some reason, but he looked at me and said, ‘I’ll do it’ and now we’ve got him up on the wall. It was a beautiful moment.”
The whole endeavor took about four weeks and on weekends, sometimes Curley would come in a couple of hours before the shop opened at 7am to set everything up and it became that customers would come in and tell him that they wanted to be a part of it.
“They’d say, ‘Hey, you haven’t taken a picture of me yet,’” Curley laughed.
Lo/Cal Coffee is at 2214 Pico Blvd and is open Mon-Sat 7am–3:30pm, Sun 8am–3:30pm and you can find out more by visiting their website at local-coffee.com/menu-new/.
