Telotypes III
Los Angeles
October 2019-September 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.

During 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 and a reflection of a bygone era of perpetual growth detrimental to people, wildlife, and the natural world.

In the seamless urban ocean, I sought and 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–distress caused by the ecological crisis–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/


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