serial consign

On contextualizing the several years I've spent on the west coast, I've often remarked that while you can take somebody out of Los Angeles, you can't get the Los Angeles out of them. More than any other city I've spent time in, Los Angeles gets under your skin and alters your perception.

I spent two years studying architecture in Culver City at the beginning of the decade and a variety of internships, research projects and a fellowship at USC have pulled me back to the city time and time again. I used to joke about L.A. being the cultural black hole at the centre of the universe, and while I can't speak for everybody I can certainly attest to the mysterious force the city exerts on me. To define my relationship with the city in terms of love and hate is far too simple. Binaries are altogether inadequate for describing a city clouded by ambiguity and characterized by veneer.

I've recently been challenged to come up with my own personal "Los Angeles aesthetics" and in thinking about this daunting task I've returned to 74 nights, a photo essay tucked away in the depths of my archives and covered by a fine layer of dust. This project (and this post for that matter) is as close to autobiography as you'll ever see here so please excuse this divergence from my usual fare.

In the summer of 2005, I accepted an internship at an architectural firm in Koreatown in midtown Los Angeles. In hindsight, accepting this gig was sort of a golden parachute, a means of escape from a dysfunctional relationship that I was involved in at the time. So that June, I checked into the first of a series of Mid-Wilshire temporary residences with little more than a camera and a copy of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project.

Some combination of my chronic insomnia, post-relationship emotional detritus and a fascination with Benjamin's "indexing" of Paris inspired me to take a stab at archiving my summer. At the time I thought I was simply trying to capture my exploration of the city. In retrospect, I can really see melancholy tattooed all over the vast majority of the shots. Regardless, it was great to get beyond the whitewashed idiosyncrasies of my earlier life in West L.A. and the obligatory archi-tourism demanded by my vocation to get a broader understanding of the urban fabric and texture of the city. I went through two pairs of shoes that summer and my legs perpetually ached as each night after work I often would just pick a direction and walk for six hours straight or until my camera ran out of batteries. I named the project 74 nights, the precise duration of my sojourn, and built a flash interface to share the ever growing body of images with my friends over the course of that summer.

I recently decided to upload 74 nights to my flickr account, so I invite anyone who is interested to give it a look. I have no pretensions of aptitude in photography, and a lot of these images are completely unremarkable. That said, given the personal nature of this work I still consider this project one of my favourite undertakings. A lot of these photographs are burned in my retinas and serve as constant frames of reference in thinking about (my reading of) the essence of Los Angeles. Since I'm looking at this material at the moment it only seemed appropriate to share it here.