Los Angeles (2026)

In his essay Album (1984), Luigi Ghirri writes that travel photography is not ‘the basic or affected description of a place, or a documentation of a physical movement inside it, but instead a gesture we perform in order to better understand a place, to perceive and discover it.’ In essence, for those who look beyond familiar images, the practice becomes a way of being with and attending to a place.

Most of the pictures presented here would never appear in a travel blog or a family photo album. Yet I think of them as my own gestures of perceiving Los Angeles during my brief introduction to it in 2026. The series emerged as a puzzle between the Los Angeles I thought I knew from all the movies, books, and photographs I had seen and read, and the city I eventually encountered; somewhere between the myth and the mundane. To photograph this place was also to unlearn it.