Los Angeles, Real America Series
Westlake/MacArthur Park
2019

For as long as I can remember, Alvarado Street between 7th and 3rd in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles was a bustling, hectic, authentically L.A. stretch of the city. It was a difficult area to photograph that I was determined to document, both because there was no place like it anywhere else on the planet and because not many other photographers were shooting there at the time.

It's a specifically American neighborhood, populated by a diverse group living alongside one another while working for a better collective future.

These photographs were taken during the tail end of an era, in 2019 before Covid upended everything in the city. Looking at the work from that time has made me realize that they depict a specific moment in time that is gone forever, a fact reinforced presently by the blocks of chain link fencing preventing vendors from setting up shop.