Hollywood Streets, 1979-1983

In the late 1970s, Matt Sweeney dropped out of high school with dreams of becoming a movie maker. While working in gas stations and restaurants in San Jose, California, he found out about Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope education/training/intern program, and moved to Hollywood to pursue that. Matt wanted to work behind the camera, so he started practicing with a Nikon F2 camera, shooting Kodachrome slides. Inspired by photographers like Garry Winogrand, Minor White, and Elliott Erwitt, he set out to document the world around him on the streets of Hollywood, photographing scenes from 1979 through 1983, while hoping somehow to hit the big time. The internship never happened, and unfortunately, no production jobs materialized. At 21, Matt moved on, selling his equipment and working through college to do lab work. "I went to Hollywood to 'make it', but didn't, and ended up taking pictures of Hollywood, capturing scenes of others 'not making it' as well. It didn't escape me then and it doesn't now." Matt held onto the slides, now more than 30 years old, and has recently begun scanning and posting them on Tumblr. "The web makes it possible to leave some kind of record of my time and share it with people". Many thanks to Matt for sharing these images below, captions by the photographer.

Read more
Hints: View this page full screen. Skip to the next and previous photo by typing j/k or ←/→.

Most Recent

  • Daniel Leal / AFP / Getty

    Photos of the Week: Spiral Shelves, Steel Cube, Village Basketball

    The World Blind Golf Championships in South Africa, a memorial for victims of the school shooting in Nashville, a tattoo convention in Ecuador, a sunrise over Rio de Janeiro, and much more

  • Paul Morigi / Getty

    A Collection of Cherry Blossoms

    Images of flowering cherry-blossom trees across the Northern Hemisphere

  • Julio Cortez / AP

    Photos: Damage From the Tornado Outbreak in Mississippi

    Images from the small town of Rolling Fork, which was struck by a destructive EF4 tornado

  • Anupam Nath / AP

    Photos of the Week: Sky Bar, Kansas Sunset, Flooded Fields

    Drought conditions in Spain, heavy snow in California, the Fallas Festival in Spain, the start of Ramadan in Indonesia, cherry blossoms in Japan, a sandstorm in Inner Mongolia, and much more