Returning

I know, strange choice, beginning a photography blog with a poorly taken image but it is the beginning. I am from Los Angeles but I didn’t grow up there. At age three my mother moved to Paris taking us with her. My brothers and I then spent our childhood shuttled as unaccompanied minors between our mom in Paris and our dad in Los Angeles.  In the early 1980’s the smog was so bad in LA that if you landed during the day you couldn’t see the city until you descended through its brown haze.  At night it can be stunning but during the day it isn’t a breath-taking city to fly over. I remember looking out the window on my childhood approaches and boiling over with excitement.  The smoggy, ill-planned city below hid my dad, my grandparents, our nanny, my best friend, Disneyland, Toys “R” Us, sunshine and basically everything childhood dreams are made of. Because we only saw our dad on school holidays my childhood impression of Los Angeles was really truly a wonderland where the most taxing thing was what shape your day-dreams would take. 
So here it is -my first view of Los Angeles without a return ticket.

Begin here.

After an unexpected turn of events I found myself suddenly leaving Europe after almost nine years. Needing a place to land immediately I chose my old hometown of Los Angeles. It was always where I answered that I was from, I had always assumed that it was home.  It was a harder landing than I had expected.

Though it is true that parts of London and Paris have gentrified in the last nine years it is nothing like the scale of change in Los Angeles over the same period. It was as though a city that had fallen asleep in the 1970’s had woken up to an amphetamine fueled rush of civic change. It was not a superficial facelift as happens for the Olympics or a convention but a change in the actual life of the city. Whole new neighborhoods had sprung up –not on the outskirts of sprawl but in the once desolate center. New boulevards, new sky-scrapers, new museums, new parks –a new public transport system. My arrival in this unknown city was coupled with the loss of my grandmother’s home, my Los Angeles anchor; a place where the passage of time really had managed to be suspended. So instead of coming home it became as though I had moved to a city that I might have visited on a vacation long ago. I set myself the task to seek out reminders of the city as I remembered -or at least what the city looked like in my memories.