A Few Days Spent Walking in L.A. and Why I Picked Up A Camera

There aren’t too many experiences that can compare with what a day in Los Angeles can afford you. There’s something happening everywhere always and it can be overwhelming if you’re not used to it.

I lived in the city when I was 20 for about a year - sleeping on a couch in my friend’s Park La Brea apartment, working as a food runner at a hotel in Beverly Hills, learning Photoshop on the side. That period of my life felt electric. I started working at a retouching studio - editing photographers’ images for magazines, movie posters and advertising. And I started walking with a camera.

The bustling city was new to me. A faster pace of life than the suburbs bordering on chaotic. In a lot of ways I grew up here, exploring restaurants and neighborhoods, famous landmarks and met a lot of amazing people. I found my spots and became a regular, then a local. I had a dream of working as a photojournalist for the L.A. Times, following in the footsteps of the photographers I admired and I started reaching out.

Nothing came of it. The emails I sent with photos I had taken went mostly unanswered or I’d get the general: “thanks but no thanks”. I started to think maybe the dream of being a photographer wasn’t for me.

I still took pictures but they just lived on Instagram as a sort of running chronicle of beautiful moments…or my lunch. They were moments I enjoyed, mostly because they were mine, but looking back, very few were what I would now consider good photographs. It didn’t feel attainable or reasonable to keep sleeping on a couch waiting for a call back so I chose something I felt was safe that came with a set schedule and an hourly rate.

For the next ten years I tried a few different career paths mostly in restaurants and hotels but with some wildland firefighting thrown in to keep it interesting. I learned about wine and food and with that came new cultures and languages. Always in the background was photography. It really did feel, does feel, like therapy. Now after all this time passing I find myself walking the same streets with a camera again. The difference is that I’m not waiting for anyone to tell me I’m a photographer. I’m just doing the thing and letting it be fun.

Maybe it’s just the fact I’m outside and walking that clears my mind. Or maybe that I’m focusing on gathering as much information about the world around me that makes everything else fall away. Just being present, the world turns into a play unfolding in front of me.

Images here are from Grand Central Market, Hollywood Boulevard around the Chinese Theater, then The Broad, US Bank Building, Olvera Street and finally, the Santa Monica Pier and Muscle Beach.

Grand Central Market is an open-air covered market with tons of vendors - food options ranging from street tacos to fresh sea urchin and oysters and pretty much everything in between. Walking through the corridor I saw a mural of Kobe and I stopped to look closer. Then I stepped back and tried a few compositions before a man came through the frame on his phone, oblivious to me or the mural. It almost looks like giant Kobe is yelling at a random guy to get off his phone. Probably a good message for me to internalize honestly.

I generally find photographing poverty to be distasteful; like here’s a person at the worst moment in their life and a photo immortalizes the moment, I can’t take those pictures. If I’m going to make that photograph, I want there to be something more I’m trying to say.

I included the picture of the person on the ground is because their face isn’t visible, and because I’d watched them walk over and lie down; they kind of just chose their spot and weren’t in obvious distress. It was a strange moment next to the Chinese Theater. Here you have people from all over the world generally experiencing L.A. for the first time, and a person who lives in the city, nonplussed by the foot traffic, lays down in the middle of the sidewalk, on the Walk of Fame, to take a nap. No one stopped, people actively tried not to look. Everyone carried on with their day.

The very next thing I saw was a moving truck pull up to the light as I was crossing the street. There were four guys inside, in the middle of a hard day’s work but one guy in the back was laughing having just said or heard something funny. As I got closer to the truck i caught his eye, pointed at the camera and gave him a thumbs up - a question. “Oh what’s up man!?” he shouted with a smile and gave me the double thumbs up back so I snapped a quick shot and fist bumped him. His energy made me smile. It was so genuinely happy and light. Less than a block separated the two photographs. That’s Los Angeles.

Then one of my favorite shots from the day, the first one at the top of this page. There was a long line for the steel rings and some people who really knew how to use them flying through the arches like Spiderman. I saw a girl climbing a rope in the background and tried to make as symmetrical an image as I could. This one’s just fun, I like the separation and layering of everything.

So, why do I take pictures? I guess ultimately it allows me to process the world with the intention of looking for the beauty in everyday situations. Looking for the beautiful moments generally means you find more of them. Then that just became how I see the world without being very conscious of it. It’s a great practice. Photography has made me much more sensitive to the fleeting moment and as I go back through images I’ve made over the years I see something that changed from when I was 20 walking around the city. Somewhere along the way, photography stopped being something I did and started changing the way I looked at things.

Wherever it goes, this website is a place to show and archive the images I take while telling the stories that resonate with me, and to share them with you. Thanks for stopping by.

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