The Local Elsewhere
2021 - Ongoing
Los Angeles is busy place with a vast population that stretches as far as the eye can see, except westward where one’s gaze greets the sea. One of the few geographic anomalies that interrupt the horizon are the Santa Monica Mountains, stretching eastward to Hollywood and north toward Malibu and beyond. A few people wealthy enough, and brave enough to risk the imminent fire danger live there. Most of us nature loving Angelinos, however, can only visit from time to time. The mountains are close, yet distinctly different from the grid of roads and stretch of freeways that connect a densely populated matrix of urban communities. From where I live, depending on traffic it can take anywhere from fifteen minutes to more than an hour to drive there. It is local, yet somewhere else altogether, the local elsewhere. Like much of the California coastline, the flora is both wild and domesticated, native and imported.
These images were an excuse to roam the many trails that pick up where the paved roads leave off. I did not embark on this project with a predetermined idea of what I might find, except perhaps the path itself.
Rather than impose standard formats and sizes on this body of work, I am letting it grow more organically over a period of time. It’s as if the trail and landscape are my laboratory; a place to both explore and shape images out of the ecology of chaparral in the present moment. In another sense, these photographs document what future fires and global warming are sure to change.