CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/18/2015

Both Sides of Sunset

"Los Angeles is a city where one story, where the only story, is never enough," David L. Ulin writes in his Introduction to Both Sides of Sunset, Metropolis Books' best-selling anthology of Los Angeles photographs, launching tonight at Hamburg Kennedy in New York. "Cognitive dissonance? Possibly… although I prefer to imagine it in terms of Keats' negative capability, which F. Scott Fitzgerald defined as 'the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time.' That is what Los Angeles means to me, what it finally taught me: that it is not standing against or for the archetype, but accepting both the archetype and everything else. City of sprawl, city of neighborhoods. City of wealth and poverty, celebrity and anonymity, 'a city no worse than others,' as Raymond Chandler once described it, 'a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.'" Featured image is Mauren Brodbeck's "Untitled Urbanscape 17" (2004).