Tripping the light Fantastic.
In Grey Crawford, Chroma, 1978–85, Vol 1. Beam Editions. First Edition 2022
Modern los Angeles exists because of light. The bright harsh western light is ideal for filmmaking, its strength working in combination with the silver impregnated film strip to produce crisp sharp images. The kind of process that is simply not possible in the dark old east, and certainly not in the winters of the old countries of Europe.
Los Angeles thrived in its modern form because of the relationship of light to the land. Within a two-hour drive of the sunset strip this intense filming light falls upon high desert, low tide and snowy mountainside. Providing backdrops that, with a little magic, can be made to look like anywhere on earth.
But for an outsider like me, living in the north of England, where for months at a time the light is dappled and flat, LA’S harsh light is its defining feature. The architecture, the flat roofs and expansive buildings, the low rise, creates an openness and emptiness onto which the light performs.
Long landscape rectangles cover the rugged ground. The screening rooms of the film studios, the billboards along the motorways, the solid bus stop benches, the unique geometry of the cities industry from elevated highways, the sides of stucco buildings, all become flat open screens, expanses, on which harsh diagonal shadows appear and disappear.
Los Angeles is a city of screens waiting for their light.
Unlike my comfy English shadows that are faint and soft around their edges, in LA its as if a spotlight has been turned on, creating dark blacks and bright whites onto which Angelinos are players. The fire exits and delivery entrances, always enticingly unsymmetrical, are divided by shadowed geometric lines breaking the cities spaces into a clean graphic style.
If Paris is the city of lights, multiple gently flickering, then LA is the city of light, singular intense and inescapable. And this light as it hits the geometry of the new architecture produces, more than anywhere else I know, a city of angles.
As I travel along the unfamiliar golden roads, rough and noisy under the tyres of an car incapable of fitting on my European street, with mariachi on the radio, the billboards and signs become colour reference cards, grounding and correcting the painfully blue sky. The advertising screens becoming perspective devices for focus pullers. The blurred rectangles move and vibrate, spin and change perspective like a mobile in the wind, blocking out the sky and mountains. The man made, angular and minimal, interrupting the natural rugged and untameable becomes the defining image of LA.
Los Angeles is notoriously unwalkable. The relationships between the high sierra, the rugged coast and the brutally cold minimalism of the LA vernacular architecture always viewed at speed from car windows turns the city into a flickering series of still images, almost filmic in the way you experience it. Like an old movie, you sense the gaps between the shots.
There is always a tension between the sharp angles of concrete and the visual blur and vibrations of viewing them at speed. The intricacies of a graphic designer’s craft, the promise of better teeth, better health, and better memories become seemingly random blocks of colour through the windscreen. Centred in your vision, high on pedestals as if to resist you in comprehending the actuality of the city below.
The promises of the future become blank screens, just colour, the promise of a better future only blocks the sky.
Maybe because of this speed, the gaps and ally ways the delivery areas and even the river go almost unnoticed, like the blotch on a film that tells the projectionist when to change the reels, you only see the in-betweens of Los Angeles if concentrating on looking, or they fall between the cracks of your vision from the highway.
LA doesn’t seem to stop or change style at its rural edges and boundaries. as city turns desert, turns deserted. It simply expands its gaps, as you travel towards the outskirts, the architecture, the screens, rectangles, and low rise never changes, the landscape just forces them further apart. The relationship between vista and distance, view and obstruction play out across an expanded stage, as if the city itself has been grabbed at both ends and stretched.
It is LA, its geometry, its screens, its ability to stretch and contract as you travel through it, its shadow its light that is Crawford’s material. How it feels to move between those buildings and vistas, to exist within those warm screens and bright light, those gaps between landscape and man-made. It’s as if the cities unique elements are distilled, boiled down not as an image of LA but as an image OF LA. Made with and from its very DNA, Light. These are not pictures showing us California, but pictures made of California.