The Public Work
Pandemic Los Angeles Prologue
The Public Work Series (2020)
The beginning of this decade was wild. 2020 was such a crazy, tumultuous year that it seems like something out of a movie. I had my camera in hand the whole time amid the chaos of the pandemic, quarantines, shutdowns, and protests, documenting it all from ground level and recording my thoughts as everything unfolded. I had just started a photography project called “The Public Work” which I used as a platform to share the work I was making, culminating in an appearance on the Arts page of the New York Times in August 2020 and three self published zines.
Recently I’ve been looking back at the work I created during the height of the pandemic. The passage of time plays an enormous role in my photography work and this case is no different. Separating experience from interpretation is vital for me to fully process the images I capture. In hindsight it’s easy to see both how important images from that time are to my body of work as a whole and how much I’ve grown as an artist since then. I realized that it was time to revisit a year that was so consequential that we are all still collectively reeling from its effects. Over the next two months, I will be publishing a 5 part series called "Pandemic Los Angeles" on Archival Recordings. In each entry I’ll be revisiting the essays that I wrote back in 2020, expanding on them and sharing unseen and remastered photographs from that year.
1/2020 | Prologue
Sometimes it’s difficult to imagine what daily life was like before the COVID. It’s a common assumption that the pandemic is over and everything is back to normal but that’s not really true. In Los Angeles the scars left by the shutdown are visible in the numerous closed storefronts and once thriving business centers that have been decimated. That contrast is what makes the images in this set so interesting, they‘re artifacts from an idealistic outlook I no longer possess. I started The Public Work with dreams of documenting the daily rhythms of my city and it turned into a record of one of the darkest points in recent history. That shift is something I still think about almost every day.
So welcome to the beginning of ”The Public Work: Pandemic Los Angeles. I hope you stick with me as I return to a space most of us would like to forget, but many are unable to.
Pandemic Los Angeles 01 drops next week.
*I mentioned that “The Public Work” evolved into a set of 3 self published zines. Although Books 1 & 2 are long gone, I still have copies of Book 03 available in my online shop. Click the link below for details:
Archival Recordings