I love living in downtown LA and I love creating street photography. Ever since early 2020, I’ve been walking around the local neighborhoods with my camera almost daily.
Lately, I’m really interested in capturing the sort of natural deconstruction of these street posters I see around the Historic District and other neighborhoods. They begin their lifecycle as promotional tools for brands, products, and events, and over the days and weeks after they’re first mounted, the street leaves it’s mark, from tags and graffiti to political messaging and just random destruction.
The main area where I’ve been capturing most of these posters is on the old Hamburgers/May Company building on 8th Street between Broadway and Hill. The building is boarded up on all three street-facing sides, and people have been putting up posters there for years.
Now, here’s the angle that really intrigues me. New posters are pasted up once or twice a week, and someone in the neighborhood makes a regular thing of tearing them and ripping parts of them off. I’m really curious about this – is it just one person? Is it random people tearing at them? It piques my curiosity.
It feels like a sort of serendipitous collaboration between strangers, with them randomly tearing the posters up and me capturing the strangely compelling compositions they uncover.
This all creates a kind of urban magic. Sometimes, I think of studying these pieces like reading tea leaves – this chaotic composition of random images and physical interaction that creates these unique visuals that resonate with their own fractured messages from the street.
These boarded-up walls create this kind of living art gallery, where the display changes regularly, a little or a lot, but it’s always different, and I just find that incredibly compelling and kind of magical.