Golden State Freeway/San Fernando Pass; from Los Angeles 02.12.04

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—and meaning and light—in 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—and 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—eternality and contingen