OUR guest this Wednesday night will be Kevin McCollister -- the eye and imagination behind the
website, blog and
book -- East of West L.A.
I first encountered McCollister's work via a friend who thought there was "something about it" that I would connect with. McCollister was photographing Los Angeles, but a Los Angeles that looked, my friend said, "out of time."
When I sat down to take a deeper look, paging though the images on his
blog, I saw what he meant. The L.A. that McCollister was photographing in a meticulous way -- on foot, every weekend, day and night -- was one that felt not simply unique but personal. Not personal to him -- but to the viewer as well.
Much of it is visual poetry.
I'm writing about McCollister and his blog, East of West L.A., for a new magazine called, Boom, published by UC Press. I spent a couple of weekends wandering around downtown Los Angeles with him so that I could get a sense of how he works. I was less interested in the mechanics -- shutter speeds, aperture, ISO -- more interested in how he related to the city as a subject, and how he interacted with the people who inhabit this place.
Many of the themes we have been exploring in this course -- migration, immigration, erasure, vanished L.A., -- shimmer up in McCollister's images of street musicians, drifters, abandoned lifeguard towers, emptied-out storefronts, rainy terra cotta walkways on Olvera Street. What he sees isn't the postcard or tourist book version of L.A. but something else -- something quiet or overlooked.
Here's an image from the second day we spent threading around Chinatown. Not what you would expect:
McCollister takes us deep into the city's psyche; he reveals the minute working parts: the train yards, the farmacias, the bus stops, the hints of things raveling at the edges. There's beauty in all of that hard work and survival.
Take a look at his
website and
the blog and come to class with one question for McCollister about his work, about his life, about Los Angeles.
-- L.G.
