LA Freeways

(2017-present)

 

Los Angeles is larded with freeways -- some 500 miles worth. Opinions range. These crowded roads with their stacked interchanges are engineering marvels, eyesores, destroyers of neighborhoods. They are, as Wikipedia puts it, LA's "cultural touchstones."

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This project focuses on LA’s freeways and all that they enable: segregation, bubble mentality, the extravagance of automobility. These images show the perspective from the ground, the views that we ignore as we edge up the on-ramps, chatting away, reading our email.

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In some places, freeways are found at the perimeter, circling the city, but in Los Angeles, the freeways barge right through, separating communities. As a result, people from every economic level can be found living next to the freeway -- the homeless in their encampments, and middle class neighborhoods, certainly, but even luxury homes and condos.

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That spirit of living alongside freeways has informed these pictures -- not the experience of being ON the freeway, but the experience at the edge, at street level, at the human boundary of the freeway.