Dotan Saguy Returns to Venice Beach in Color, With a 2028 Book Planned

Dotan Saguy's new color series Venice Beach: The Color of Enduring Wonder, featured in Issue #38 of Dodho Magazine's print edition, returns to the two-mile Los Angeles boardwalk he photographed in black and white between 2015 and 2017 — and the companion photobook is planned for 2028, marking the tenth anniversary of his first monograph.

Saguy, born on an Israeli kibbutz near the Lebanese border and raised in a working-class Paris suburb, published Venice Beach: The Last Days of a Bohemian Paradise with Kehrer Verlag in 2018. That black-and-white book documented a neighborhood under pressure, shot on a Leica M Monochrom, a camera that captures only monochrome images.

What did the first book capture?

Saguy moved to Los Angeles from New York in 2003 and left a technology career for photography in 2015, after building a mobile app business designed, on the model of Tim Ferriss's The 4-Hour Workweek, to fund his shooting. A semester of photojournalism at Santa Monica College preceded a rapid breakthrough year: ABC News paid for his Old Havana slideshow, he won first place in a National Geographic competition — a four-day assignment in South Korea with one of their editors — and he was accepted, first try, to both the Missouri Photo Workshop and the Eddie Adams Workshop.

In Venice, change "found its way into my pictures," he said. Snapchat was spreading across dozens of buildings with, in his words, "very little regard for the community organizations and small businesses it pushed out." Rents were skyrocketing. The young mother on his book cover received an eviction notice mid-project. He witnessed protests outside Snapchat's headquarters on the day the company went public, and the Venice Beach Freakshow closing for good in April 2017 — "probably the single most symbolic moment I witnessed." What began as celebration became "a race to document a way of life before it disappeared."

Why color now?

Saguy thought he had been documenting an ending. "I was wrong, and I'm happy to admit it," he said. After the pandemic, corporate presence pulled back and, following a chaotic period of homeless encampments on the boardwalk, the "weird, unpolished Venice" returned. Today the place feels "vivid, hopeful and alive rather than under siege" — a shift he calls a big reason he picked the camera back up, this time in color.

He began shooting Venice entirely in color in 2024, wanting a fresh way of seeing a stretch he had photographed for a decade, and folded in archive images "accidentally" shot in color. His method stays constant — an acronym he teaches as Design, Information, Moment (DIM) — but the design element now rests on complementary colors, analogous colors, repetition and accents. His influences remain Henri Cartier-Bresson and Alex Webb, whose The Suffering of Light is the one book he would keep.

The series depicts skateboarding, beach gatherings, and Muscle Beach bodybuilding competitions. He is drawn especially to older competitors. "Nothing says 'enduring' quite like a 78-year-old flexing in a Speedo in front of a crowd," he said. "Venice was never about perfection. It's about passion, and doing your thing in public, as a community and without apology."

On style, Saguy is blunt: "limitations are what craft a style." Shooting into the midday sun at f/5.6 to f/11, without ND filters, forced him to layer frames neatly.

What comes next?

The 2028 book will mirror its predecessor in format, dimensions and cover materials, with a different color linen and fully color content. The 2018 first edition sold out quickly and was reprinted; saved first-edition copies will be sold with the new book as a collector bundle. Saguy has three Kehrer monographs to date, edited with Gail Fisher, formerly a senior photo editor at National Geographic and the Los Angeles Times; the two now teach workshops together.

Further afield, Arrested Decay documents Bodie, California's decaying ghost-town interiors, while Erased from the Land covers the aftermath of the wild horse roundup in the Mono Lake area, supporting Ronda Kauk's Indigenous Wild Horse Society. He'll keep photographing Venice's drum circle, skate park and Sunday bike parade — and lately, Paris.