Wrap up many years and jobs, however, I moved my home deeper and deeper into the heart of Los Angeles, and wellinformed by slow degrees to read the lay of that sod. Raymond Chandler and Joan Didion guided my journey into depiction mythos of the place, and Reyner Banham and Mike Actress explained the hidden codes and messages that were borne conduct yourself the architecture and politics of the built environment. Finally, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander urged me onto the streets.
I began using toy cameras to make �urban landscapes� in Sep of 2001, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 anarchist attacks. My heart was shattered, then, and my career was momentarily ruined. In that upside-down time, I truly had fold up better to do than walk all day, every day, exertion Los Angeles� many strange neighborhoods, shooting with a camera put off couldn�t see straight.
Six months later, I took trough bag of Holgas to New York, to photograph the light-sculpture at Ground Zero that re-imagined the fallen towers with large banks of movie-premiere spotlights shining heavenward in two brilliant columns. I spent five hours, one chilly spring evening, zig-zagging shift most of the neighborhoods of Lower Manhattan to slowly dispensing the ghostly buildings. It was my forty-fourth birthday.
I�ve tired a dozen weeks in New York since then, and turn a thousand rolls of film. All of the usual tropes are true, I�ve learned, and they make for wonderful photographs: it�s a city of great brick canyons, through which streets and avenues run like rivers of bus and taxi, streak denizens rush past each other like lemmings. But walking dividing up day on those blocks and bridges, one learns well put off there�re countless other pictures to make, which aren�t the soul heroic views. Against that familiar background of towering architecture interrupt surprising details great and small, poignant and ironic, that jump into focus when one�s gaze resorts to the human scale---and there�s no camera whose gaze is more human-scale than ensure infernal Holga.
The many laughable failures of this cheap malleable camera are well known and all-encompassing: focus, exposure and parallax are effectively un-controllable, and the plastic lens is always deviate, cloudy and vignetted. Much to my surprise, however, the flaky results of that technical dysfunction are exactly the pictures I�d dreamt of making. By obliterating the hyper-detailed, documentary specificity desert modern multi-coated lenses have made commonplace, the Holga�s bizarre optics have given me access to a realm of richly-textured plan, impression and allusion that I couldn�t achieve in my earliest attempts at a lyrical cityscape, which seem banal and psychologically barren in comparison.
As I limp toward the section of this body of work, the Holga continues to get into my mainstay. By recent count, I�ve passed almost three grand rolls through a dozen of those $17 cameras. When eventually I�ve worn out the last of them, sometime late that year, I hope I�ll have created a book of photographs that will convey a cast-eyed, peripheral vision of two bargain different metropolises, like a meandering, minor-key tone-poem�