Art major Laura Diamond ’04 recently received a grant from the Getty Research Library,
the first ever undergraduate student to be awarded a research grant by the Getty. Her thesis is
on photojournalist Leonard Nadel (1916–90) and the photos he took documenting public housing
projects in Los Angeles in the mid to late 1940s. In doing this work she has uncovered a compelling
story of race relations, urban design, and the social history of cities. Nadel’s images of
Pueblo Del Rio and Aliso Village reveal the social experiments of interracial housing in an era
of segregation; he was one of the first to document this subject. Diamond applied to the Getty
because the library had recently acquired the albums, notes, and correspondence of this photographer,
who has not before been studied. Diamond competed against seasoned academics, authors, and others
for this opportunity to pursue her work in the Getty archives.
