Telotypes II
Los Angeles,
2019–2022
Telotypes is an ode to the spirit of Los Angeles and an homage to Lewis Baltz.
Between 2019 and 2022, I photographed the colorful yet enormous pressure Los Angeles exerts on the landscape and its effect on people’s psyches.
Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, Los Angeles ground to a halt, and the ruthless nature of the built environment reasserted itself. LA became a disquieting hall of mirrors, one that propagated the image of a bygone era of perpetual growth detrimental to people, wildlife, and the natural world.
At that time, I lived in a large community house with another 8-10 people. The house was a safe cocoon I could return to and digest the often raw visual encounters I had walking and biking the city. Traversing the urbanscape by foot afforded me viewpoints that driving speeds would make disappear in a blur.
In LA’s seamless urban ocean, I photographed the cracks and crevices that oozed some of L.A’.s spirit, history, and materiality in abstract minimal compositions that epitomized the city’s ravaging ecological footprint.
The word “telotype” that I forged with the Greek stems τέλος (end, boundary, border, extremity) and τύπος (mark, figure, outline) is a nod to The Prototype Works, a portfolio Lewis Baltz completed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is also a keyword that enabled me to articulate my solastalgia and echoed the embodied impression of living in a city that overshot the carrying capacity of the ecosystem that supports it.
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Read an interview led by photographer and creative director Mona Kuhn in L'Œil de la photographie: https://loeildelaphotographie.com/fr/evenement/los-angeles-topography-of-a-spirit-conversation-entre-mona-kuhn-et-yogan-muller/
