The images included are part of a student project I created while attending Otis College of Art and Design. Through the Otis photo lab I check out their Toyo View 4x5 Camera and sought to photograph remnants of the Downtown LA Theater district. At the time, I knew very little about these theaters, but understood that the process of gentrification had begun. Through this project I was attempting to work through how to document gentrification via a visual photographic medium. One of the many ideas I thought I was capturing was negating an idea that became unanimous in the 2010's. The idea that downtown is dead, and there is nothing left. As you can see in these images, while many of the skeletons of a theater culture sat vacant or re-purposed in select cases, Downtown was by far not dead, but instead became a central shopping district to low income Black and Latinx residents. The idea that downtown is dead, is then an attempt to erase the lived existence of the people captured in these images and those who operate mom and pop shops today and prior to 2013 in Downtown LA. While my original attempt was to capture only the buildings, after a day in the field of setting up and breaking down a 4x5 camera, weird looks, enthusiastic comments from on lookers who stopped in front of the lense to enthusiastically ask questions, I realized, that unless if I came at night and made 30 min exposures, there would be no way to photograph these buildings void of the Black and Latinx people who then sought to build their lives in this district; and even then, at night, I would find many houseless residents doing their best to survive the night time cold air and dangers of living on the streets. 

All of the images were scanned at high definition and edited using photoshop. I also made prints directly from the negatives.