Downtown Los Angeles 2004

Downtown Los Angeles 2004
View from Grand Ave., Downtown Los Angeles 2004

Archival Recordings 24


Hello and welcome to Archival Recordings 24! For the past couple of weeks I’ve been organizing old negatives from my archive. Things started out slow but I’ve finally found a rhythm. Turns out there’s a bit of a learning curve when it comes to scanning and editing old negatives. It took a lot of trial and error before I found a routine that produced consistent results, but now that I have things have been moving along smoothly. It’s a tedious but rewarding process, especially when you rediscover work that you had forgotten about. 

Spread the Word. Downtown Los Angeles, 2004

Aside from the technical details, I’ve also had to get creative when it comes to dating my work. Although I have kept the negatives in pretty good condition over the years, dates and locations were nonexistent. Fortunately, I can usually find clues in the actual photographs that narrow things down. Movie posters, advertisements, and graffiti usually provide enough information to establish the year that the photo was taken. For the photographs that I’m sharing today, it was a little more challenging than usual but I was able to confirm that they were taken in 2004. I used the dates on the Carlos Santana concert shirt that the man playing the harmonica is wearing as my reference point. Although it was 20 years ago, I remembered our conversation as soon as I saw the scans. I was walking down Hope street taking photos on my lunch break and he asked me what I was taking pictures of. We started a conversation and he told me about how he played harmonica with Santana at the show the previous weekend. I asked him if I could take a couple of shots of him playing and he agreed, which resulted in the photos I’m sharing today. I forgot his name but he was a really cool dude, I hope he’s doing well all these years later.

I love random interactions like this. Meeting people and learning a little bit about them is a blessing and something that is a lot harder to do these days. It’s one of the ways that I think technology has had a negative impact on us all. We are more reluctant to engage with people in the real world and I think that society suffers as a result. One of the things that I enjoy the most about my photographic practice is that it places me in the physical world and forces me to interact with it. 

The other pictures in this set are all from downtown the same year. It was a very different place visually and it shows. I’m very happy that I was able to capture so much from this time period as it predates the redevelopment boom that has transformed the area.

Macy's 7th Street Plaza (now The Bloc), Downtown Los Angeles 2004.

Thanks for reading! See y'all next newsletter.

-Kwasi Boyd-Bouldin