In 2018, Kehrer Verlag published my black-and-white photobook, Venice Beach: The Last Days of a Bohemian Paradise, documenting the Venice Beach boardwalk between 2015 and 2017, as corporate encroachment—led by Snapchat’s occupation of dozens of buildings and the eviction of longtime fixtures such as the Freak Show—threatened to erase its bohemian soul.
The book sold quickly and went on to win a bronze medal from a major German photography prize, while the cover image also appeared on the cover of Photo Magazine in France. Both The Guardian and the Los Angeles Times covered the story.
Since then, Venice has changed again: the corporate presence has receded, and the eccentric, unpolished spirit that first defined the boardwalk has returned. This new body of work, photographed in color as early as 2015 but pursued in earnest over the past two years, reimagines the same place through an entirely different visual language—one suited to a Venice that now feels vivid, hopeful, and alive rather than under siege.
Timed to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the original book, the project is being developed as a companion volume titled Venice Beach: The Color of Enduring Wonder, with a major photobook publisher already informally on board for publication in 2028.
About Dotan Saguy
Dotan Saguy is a documentary and street photographer based in Los Angeles. He grew up in a working-class suburb of Paris before emigrating to the United States, where he built a career as a high-tech entrepreneur. In 2015, he left that career to pursue photography full-time.
His first monograph, Venice Beach: The Last Days of a Bohemian Paradise (Kehrer Verlag, 2018), documented the endangered bohemian culture of his adopted home in black and white and received a Bronze Award at the Deutscher Fotobuchpreis. Two further monographs, Nowhere to Go but Everywhere and DOGTOWN, followed with Kehrer Verlag. His work has been recognized as a Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50 selection, featured in National Geographic, The Guardian, and LensCulture, among others, and used in international advertising campaigns for Leica.
Venice Beach: The Color of Enduring Wonder brings Saguy back to the same shoreline a decade later, this time in color, focusing on what has endured there rather than on what has been lost.
Saguy also teaches documentary and street photography through Leica Akademie, Momenta Workshops, and his own Storyteller Workshops. [Official Website]
