Welcome To Los Angeles
Welcome to Los Angeles is a collection of photographs made off and on for many years up to 2019, while walking with my camera in different areas of Los Angeles County. It is by no means a comprehensive representation of LA, but rather intended more as a visual poem picturing the unnoticed. For the most part, I have wandered the streets and neighborhoods where a tourist would never think to go. As a teacher I give an assignment called "Documentary Style — Picturing America," and this project started out as my participation with that endeavor; as a way of saying to my students that I won't ask you to do something I haven't done too. As it has turned out, these are not really very useful as documentary photographs, however, they are not without a sense of place. By limiting the scope of this project to local turf, the overall collection of photographs takes on somewhat more continuity and authenticity. I'm not getting any younger, but I'm still walking, still looking, still abiding in the present moment for what presents itself through a mindful approach to picture making. If there's anything these images share other than being made in this vast geographic zone, it is the groundless root of open awareness that brought these photographs into being. The place itself, Los Angeles, seems to big to explain visually. When I was a child growing up here, its edges forever expanding, it was hard for me to imagine its limit — LA just kept on going as far as the eyes could see. I'm still looking for LA and a way to make peace with it and call it home.