WHISPERS IN THE ECHO CHAMBER

Go, go home team!….oh, and by the way, we have a new double feature this week. (Los Angeles, 2025)

By MICHAEL PERKINS

LOS ANGELES ALMOST SINGLEHANDEDLY INVENTED the fine art of “made you look”, the science of both creating and satisfying pure sensation. That’s why it’s irony-on-steroids that the town is also a tough place in which to….. attract attention.

In a town where the billboard for the latest Fast & Furious epic typically takes up the entire side of a downtown skyscraper and a local mountain range advertises itself with letters the size of a house, the abnormally huge, the Neon Loud, is perpetually being amped up, as what were once obvious appeals to the senses become just more of the visual noise floor. L.A. is the carnival barker gone nuclear, and the images that persist in pop memory are nearly always of the more obvious “titanic”, “colossal”, or “amazing” elements in the mix.

Two guesses what we sell here. (Los Angeles, 2025)

But hang in the smaller neighborhoods; the Venices, the Little Tokyos, the Melroses, and cast your eyes closer to the pavement. See the storefronts. The triple-A contenders for the limited amount of attention that any human passerby can effectively invest. Observe the messaging. Simple. Immediate. Yeah, we’re talking’ to YOU. And instead of the obvious tourist-pic checklist, make pictures instead of the whispers within the city’s vast echo chamber. There, you will not find million-dollar digital graphics, but innovative, even home-made appeals for your eye. Reclaiming old alleys in murals. Blinking in flickery neon over entrances to places simply known as “food” or “eats”. Display windows that must convey, in the moment it takes you to wander past the proprietor’s one-location location, What We Do and Why You Need It.

Hey, we already owned this Jewish deli, so why not paint a whole history of the neighborhood on the side of the building, which needed painting anyway? Los Angeles, 2025

Los Angeles is equal parts poetic and pathetic, vulgar and elegiac, creative and crude. Y’know, like everywhere Angl in America, only more so. More of everything. If they ever manage to get the town in some kind of true “balance”, who knows? It may become as big a yawner as the places we left in order to come here. But for now, live with the weird equilibrium. And before you automatically default your camera eye to the obviously magnificent, train a few frames on the less obviously marvelous.