CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/3/2015

Both Sides of Sunset: Photographing Los Angeles

Dennis Stock's "Venice Beach Rock Festival" (1968) is reproduced from Both Sides of Sunset , the most compelling collection of Los Angeles photographs in recent history and a featured title at our bookstore at Paris Photo Los Angeles. Essayist David L. Ulin writes, "There is much in L.A. that is not meaningful—at least not on the terms we’ve been taught. Both Sides of Sunset, however, defies us not to shift our thinking, not to refract the city through a different lens... What do we do with such photos, such locations? How to integrate them into a coherent sense of place? The answer is that we do and don’t, the puzzle of Los Angeles played out in every interaction, every time we go into its vast cacophony. Archetypes and their opposite, the tension to which I keep returning, the one I’ve never quite resolved. Still, here perhaps, or so these images appear to tell us, they are becoming (in their own elusive fashion) reconciled."