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Shoot what you know and where you live
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Art van found on the streets around LA - could I have found a relative?
Shooting the familiar and accessible seems like common sense advice but most of us never open our eyes to what's around us as photographers. My wake up moment was when I saw Sally Mann's black and white photographs of her Appalachian family. Hey, I thought, I have dirt poor backwoods relatives, why didn't I ever think to do a photo project on them? I totally ignored this slice of Americana around me in the hot summer months I spent in Arkansas. I never thought to turn my camera on those experiences or on my grandparents who filled their old cars with every soda bottle they ever drank, then junked them in their weed-choked backyard. Sometimes the familiar is taken for granted or intentionally ignored.
Conventional wisdom seems to be that you have to travel to exotic places like Thailand or Vietnam in order to take great pictures. I have news for you: Los Angeles is as exotic as it gets. People from all over the world come here as tourists or to find fame and fortune. Our hometown is a beautiful, sexy, multi-cultural, poverty stricken, dangerous, architecturally diverse, relevant, hip, underground melting pot of a social experiment. You gotta love LA.
Los Angeles becomes a very interesting subject if you approach photographing it as if it were a travel piece about a foreign country. I feel lucky to see so much of LA working as a photographer. I've shot at the beach, on skyscraper rooftops, in spectacular mansions and on skid row, but it wasn't until recently that I started documenting the trip instead of just the destination. I have seen some crazy stuff around LA, like a guy at a stoplight wearing a full Santa Suit and beard in August when it's over 100 degrees, actresses dressed as prostitutes going to casting calls being harassed by real hookers being territorial, costumed superheroes smoking and eating in front of the Burger King on Highland Ave, Elmo and Cookie monster being handcuffed and arrested in front of Grauman's Chinese Theater, pallet bon fires burning in the middle of the street at 4 AM in the Nickel with the disenfranchised dancing around them like druids, the homeless Echo Park bird guy directing pigeons to fly around in unison performing an ornithological air show at the Alameda off ramp ...you get the picture. Unfortunately, I didn't photograph any of these things because I wasn't carrying a camera with me or I didn't take the time to stop and capture the moment. I just considered all of those things the spice flavoring life in LA, not valid photo projects.
I now carry a camera with me at all times, two if you count the iPhone. In addition to driving, I ride a bike 100+ miles each week around Los Angeles. I make it a point to stop and document the crazy things that I see each day as a tribute to life in Los Angeles. There is a great deal of interest in LA life around the world. We are envied for living in this weird paradise of a dream machine. I encourage every photographer who lives here to pick up a camera and photograph what you know and where you live. While you are at it, get some inspiration from Patrick Ecclesine's Faces of Sunset Blvd, Brad Elterman's "Like it Was Yesterday" gallery show at Equator Books or take a gritty urban photo tour of LA with Urban Photo Adventures (see my review here).
