LA Joints

(2012-2018)

 

In 1996, California passed Proposition 215, legalizing medical marijuana, and in 2003, the state Senate passed Bill 420 (really!), creating an identity card system for marijuana patients. But it was not until 2016 that state voters legalized marijuana for recreational use.

During this period, medical marijuana dispensaries tried to make the best of – and take advantage of – poorly defined rules. This was particularly true in Los Angeles, where dispensaries long existed in a legal haze, playing cat and mouse with the city government, opening their doors, moving, reopening, changing their names, like illegal speakeasies, even when dispensary owners had the best of intentions.

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In 2009, there were said to be 1000 dispensaries in Los Angeles – more pot shops than Starbucks outlets, according to one famous statistic. Eventually, the city got things under control.

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I began photographing dispensaries in 2012, when the landscape of LA was still rich with pot shops. I photographed more than 350 dispensaries, witnessing the death and rebirth of countless shops. I aimed to capture the provisional nature of these shops -- some announcing themselves to passing traffic, some trying to blend into the woodwork. But most of all, I tried to describe the provisional nature of Los Angeles itself — the edges of the city, the fringe districts full of disposable buildings repurposed as temporary homes for marijuana vendors trying to get rich quick, before the city could catch up with them.