An Evolving Landscape
72 photographs · downtown Los Angeles, Echo Park, Venice · 2011–2021
For ten years I walked the same few blocks with a camera, the whole time working a job I did not want to leave and could not stop wanting to leave.
I lived at 7th and Spring. Broadway, Santee, the jewelry district, the fashion district, Little Tokyo — most of this book was made within a mile or so of that door. Echo Park and Venice on the weekends, and once in a while somewhere further out. I photographed Los Angeles from 2011 until the night I left it.
I know I was there over and over, because things come back. A man in a Superman beanie crossing 7th and Broadway in daylight with a large stuffed lion under his arm and his bedding. Two days earlier, at night, that same lion under the head of someone asleep on the pavement in a blue floral duvet. I went looking for neither picture. I walked the same route and the route handed them back.
I should say what I was actually doing, because the pictures do not say it and I have let people assume otherwise. I was photographing my own fear. The people here who are asleep on the sidewalk, who are bent over a needle beside a loaded shopping cart, who are sitting on a Broadway bench covered head to foot in white powder — I was not observing them. I was looking at the version of my life I believed was waiting if I left the job and did this instead.
And I would talk to them. I would tell someone I had taken their picture and we would end up in a conversation, and more than once what came back was the exact thing I was most afraid of hearing: that they had done what I wanted to do, and that this is where it had put them. They were kind to me about it, which made it worse.
So the distance in these pictures never closes. Everyone here has made a place out of what was available, and I am always just outside it, holding a camera, with somewhere to be in the morning.
I was not the only one keeping that distance. The whole city kept it. People felt for the ones on the sidewalk, and said so, and sat down at the next table and ordered. I am not exempting myself.
I left on Halloween night, 2021, and I have not been back. Some of the film left the city with me undeveloped. I did not see those pictures until Maine, three thousand miles from any chance of going back for a better one.
The landscape in the title is Los Angeles, and it is also me. Both were changing the whole time I was photographing. Only one of us is still there.
For Michelle,
who walked the last of these streets with me
