Hooray for Hollywood.
Home to starlets and chancers, hustlers and hobos, wannabees, witches, and me.
This place, where a Porche gets lazy in the sun and a girl does whippets on the bus. This place where the competition is fierce but the pace is slow.
LA seduced me, and so I joined the long line of admirers, throwing down with other creatives in a bid to win her approval. Only ever managing to scratch the surface.
Everything is different now. The one constant is that this city is a place of impermanence. When I look around it’s as if someone razed the whole scene to the ground and rebuilt it several times over. I have watched two ends of the spectrum growing further and further apart, with me existing somewhere in the middle.
When I started Hollywoodland I was looking for an antidote, a place where I could create with no rules, shoulds, or have-tos. I wanted to produce images that felt honest.
It’s work that didn’t cater to anything or anyone. In short, I wanted to use my own voice.
My own rules for this work were simple:
Shoot only on my phone
Shoot whatever I was moved to shoot
Shoot with no judgment or expectation.
It was a new discipline for me, a way of keeping my eye trained, and one that brought total spontaneity and freedom of expression.
That was 20 years ago and to this day I have been shooting LA every day.
This is my portrait of the city. My own story about this place.
This is Hollywoodland.