On the road: In the right place at the right time

"Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car", E.B. White once wrote. And so photojournalist Jan Stuermann hits the road in the August edition of Spotlight to present us with an insider's view of the "real" California, "the California people seek when following their dreams".

Like the best road trips, the best photographs are happy accidents. John Steinbeck said, "People don't take trips... trips take people." Do photographs take the photographer? Well, a photographer has to have a sixth sense for being in the right place at the right time, and to recognize the moment when it arrives. Stuermann is a traveler in G.K. Chesterton's sense of the word: "The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see."  From the beautiful bodybuilders on Muscle Beach (which Stuermann features this week in the Spotlight photo blog he's been keeping for the past year and a half) to the friendly pseudo-Danes in Solvang, and from Bubblegum Alley, a spontaneous expression of community, to Hearst Castle, a newspaper magnate's dream home, he discovers, through the lens of his camera, California's love-affair with pleasure, kitsch and nostalgia.

For the road: On the next page, review Stuermann's portrait of the Golden State as you practise the prepositions of place and the adverbs of time used above and in the article.

Anne Hodgson