Peter Baker

Los Angeles Without Boundaries

These pictures were made in downtown Los Angeles in 2020-21 when the city was more or less shutdown. It was not my intention to photograph in response to the pandemic. I had been making a larger body of work for several years focussed on what I saw as the socio-spatial schism of the city. The municipal, financial & entertainment districts of downtown LA are often mirages of privately owned sidewalks, pedestrian bridges & plazas presenting themselves as public space. With that in mind I was drawn to the idea of the city itself as a kind of image, one in constant tension with the reality of everyday life playing out within its domain.

Part of that tension is the endless construction of large-scale new development projects, promising luxury urban life, despite being unaffordable and even off limits to the average denizen. The title Los Angeles Without Boundaries comes from the slogan for the residential & retail complex Metropolis, which boasts of being Your Oasis in the City. What it actually presents is closer to Mike Davis’ warning from Fortress L.A., of a “laboriously constructed illusion of a Downtown ‘renaissance.’’ The irony, of course, is that physical & social boundaries are deliberately built into the whole environment and the pandemic only crystalized this to my eye.

Social-distance, as it were, described the scene well before the term came into the cultural lexicon, but if there was any perception that downtown LA was enjoying a post-gentrified ‘renaissance,’ that reversed course through the various stages of shutdown. Emptied of a workforce, tourists, film crews & sports fans, a recurring cast of subjects in my work, it was only a growing population of the houseless & distressed at street level, while climate controlled high- rises stood vacant & moving screens proliferated, absent their target audience. Uninterested in making overt pictures of the manifest despair unfolding & following the early city guidelines, I stayed home like most people who could. But by the time the street protests erupted in the wake of the murder of George Floyd & National Guard troops were deployed to LAPD Headquarters, I was back out to work as I witnessed downtown’s pseudo-public streets transition willfully into a proxy-military zone.

As the months went on & the scene quieted down, so too did the pictures. I continued to photograph as both a way to stay engaged with the social-landscape & make use of my time. This book serves as a slightly divergent chapter of the larger body of work.

(from the introduction of the book published by Kris Graves Projects, 2024).