Images of Los Angeles, the infant terrible of urban sprawl. I took many of these photographs while riding the streets of LA on a motorcycle. I rode until drove by something that caught eye, shot the picture and rode on. I did this until 1987 when my left leg and the rest of my life was forever mangled by two dull normal Los Angeles commuters.
     There is no single, definitive image of Los Angeles.
     There is nothing that captures the essence of its soul, which is as multivarious as its urban sprawl is vast. In this collection I chose to avoid emphasizing the standard and familiar shots such as the Hollywood sign.
     The images are of people, places and abstracts taken from the streets. The point of view is that the works of humans offer a greater context for meaning than do the landscapes taken in wild or rural settings. They are more complex, present both deeper and broader layers of meaning and implication.
     Most of the portraits are of street people and of the homeless. Many were taken at Justiceville in back of the Catholic Mission in downtown. Justiceville, the city of the homeless in downtown LA, was a temporary camp or cobbled tents and tarps and cardboard dwellings in an empty lot where the homeless attempted to take the responsibility of taking care of themselves. Naturally, they were forced to evacuate and go back to sleeping on the concrete sidewalks of Los Angeles gutters. Our culture does not reward dignity, responsibility and initiative on the part of the lowest classes. I live in nation so rich it can afford wars on drugs and irrelevant missile defense systems, where a single man has more wealth than the total combined wealth of the poorest 40% of the population. It is the shame of every human being in so wealthy a country that any human being lives in poverty on the concrete deserts and littered streets of our urban hells.
     I pursued a fascination with the people waiting at bus benches. I thought of them as bus bench Indians, native peoples losing the relentless battle of the invasion of wealthy predators.
     Signage, billboards, graffiti and posters paint the city with a chaotic brush of desperate messages.
     Architecture, not the pretensions of wealth and art, but the functional and mundane, capture the heart of Los Angeles.
     The ubiquitous automobile determines the arterial flow of the city, defines the lives of its denizens.
     Palm trees and color, geometry and trash, the artifacts of a people living on the edge of a continent where the big 9.0 quake lurks, waiting the dump this shelf into the womb of the sea.
     And yet, we are alive.
     We are waiting for the promised life that we are told is just around the corner.