Untitled/San Fernando Valley and Golden State Freeway/San Fernando Pass are two sides of a single photographic coin, an investigation into certain currencies of structure and place‚Äîand meaning and light‚Äîin America's largest megalopolis, Los Angeles. Each image opens separate but twinned bodies of work that were shot in close succession, now joined in an unusual "Z" binding in my latest book, LA Day/LA Night, published in April 2011 by Radius Books. Los Angeles is a desert city and is washed in the brittle and clear light common to dry climates, but that light is also profoundly influenced by coastal moisture from the Pacific Ocean‚Äîand by the effects of human inhabitation, like dust and smog. I made the Day work just after completing my archival project 100 SUNS (which meditated on the nature of atomic and hydrogen bombs), and I found that I was still looking straight into the light, perhaps attempting to capture a sense of both infinitude and apocalypse‚Äîeternality and contingency‚Äîat once. I was after a whiteness and illumination that might make light and the city itself seem corporeal and atmospheric, as well as unforgiving. The Night work was both a logical place to go after the Day, and a kind of gentle antidote to its harsh bleakness. Both bodies of work were photographed from a helicopter, and the night images were particularly challenging in a technical sense. At their best they show the terrifying and wondrous beauty of wholly human creation, a fleeting electric hubris that can even mirror night's eternal celestial vault above.

Foster Home