A photographic exploration of LA, from downtown to Beverly Hills

I’m realizing I have a type: cities that contradict themselves. Take Paris, supposedly one of the most beautiful cities on earth: I lived there for close to three years and never came to like it. Everything felt too coherently Haussmannian. Los Angeles is the opposite.

I stayed downtown, close to Skid Row, one of the highest concentrations of homelessness in the United States. Grand theaters and office buildings surrounded me, most of them abandoned, decaying or covered in graffiti, leftovers of another era. Below them, Mexican food trucks in flashy neon lights and bankrupt stores, parking lots everywhere: sometimes I realized I was the only person walking the street. At every corner, a homeless person lying on the sidewalk. And slaloming between them, autonomous delivery robots rolling through to drop off Uber Eats orders. The legend goes that these robots were regularly beaten up by homeless people to steal the food inside, so their designers added small headlights shaped like eyes. They looked “cuter”, so theft dropped significantly. I didn’t want to verify this, because it’s too seductive a story to fact-check.

A short walk away, a “Chicano” neighborhood and its market: glittery prom dresses hanging next to sun-faded bridal shops, face tattoos, Von Dutch velour tracksuits, devotional candles and magic supplies.

Only thirty minutes by car from all of this is Beverly Hills. The drive there is already an experience for a European: drive-through fast food chains, palm trees so thin and tall they seem to hang from the sky, grass lawns in front of every house. All this imagery imprinted in my mind through hours of watching MTV, now suddenly playing out before my eyes. And then, gradually, the houses grow larger, the grass improbably greener, and I knew I’d reached the hills. It’s extremely quiet there: only the sound of a tennis ball being hit somewhere, or the rhythmic footfall of an impeccably tanned jogger with his impeccably groomed dog, passing one of those houses whose value you don’t dare Google.

Scattered throughout: one modernist masterpiece after the other, from Wright and Neutra to Schindler and Lautner. An architectural laboratory unlike anywhere else. My favorite was probably the Sheats Goldstein Residence, still lived in by its owner: inside, his cowboy boots collection, and outside, the man himself, motionless with a cowboy hat in the swimming pool, so old and tanned he looked like he’d been fossilized there.

I thought I’d hate Los Angeles, but ended up loving it. Not in spite of its contradictions, but because it never resolves them. Between this pop and high culture, the glitz and decay, I felt it too: that “LA dream” thing, the mythology that anything can happen here.

Written and photographed by Alexandra van der Essen