Dispatch: Notification of Filming in Los Angeles
It's strange looking at a body of work from twenty years ago. This book has been through at least four iterations, and in the last year I finally felt like I was ready to finalize a sequence.
Something clicked for me in the editing and sequencing books the last few years. It’s a process I enjoy when everything is flowing. It's when I feel most productive with the photographs, so getting to that point is always cathartic. Four iterations sounds like indecision, and for a while it was, but working on the New York books helped me test and refine my layout ideas. When I came back to these Los Angeles photographs, I was confident in how I needed to refine the edits.
The photographs in Notification of Filming were made in Los Angeles in 2006. A selection first appeared as Medicine, a zine I made with Hamburger Eyes, which later became a longer book dummy called Los Angeles 26 where it sat frozen for years. This edit drops some photographs, adds several new ones, and arrives at a more dynamic sequence that aligns with how I want to present this body of work.
This is the longest of the Los Angeles trilogy of books, which include Genesee Palms and Carspace: Los Angeles which I’ll share in the near future. I also view this book as part of a trilogy of black and white books I’m working on which will include a book from New York City and Minneapolis eventually.
Intro Text Excerpt
I started taking long walks around Downtown after work, and on weekends taking buses out and walking as far back as I could manage before catching one home. I no longer felt the desire to invent a narrative and became more obsessed with observing reality from the sidewalks of the city. The more I walked, the more my curiosity pushed me to absorb and learn.
Los Angeles has been photographed and filmed for over a century. The landscape is generous with new perspectives and angles to explore. It was also apparent to me early on that the vast geography was overwhelming on foot. It is, after all, America's most infamous car city.
As much as I wanted to walk for miles, I would never come close to seeing all of it, but at a certain point that mattered less than building a routine from the places I could reach.
On the sidewalks it can be difficult to tell whether you are looking at a movie set or at the diverse citizens of the city working out their own narratives. Film productions post notices in the neighborhoods where they intend to work. The signs read Notification of Filming and residents act accordingly.
All spreads available on the book page.
I’m a photographer based in Minneapolis working on long-duration projects centered on walking, cities, and public space. This newsletter shares periodic dispatches from that work, along with selected images and related references. Selected work also appears on Instagram.