“The stones here speak to me, and I know their mute language. Also, they seem deeply to feel what I think... But I am a ruin myself, wandering among ruins”
–Heinrich Heine
6
Introduction
7
Los Angeles is a city which has long thrived on the continual re-creation of its own myth. It was imagined long before it was built, designed to avoid city-wide bankruptcy in the 1890s. It is ever evolving, changing, and in the process, forgetting. As new buildings are erected, the old must go. The past is reinscribed and relocated, to the memories of those who still remember, and for the people later to come, these memories are kept from them. As a continuation of documenting the erasure of history, I decided to turn my focus to my surroundings, the city of Los Angeles. Through a book called, “The History of Forgetting,� recording the history of erasure in LA, by Norman M. Klein, I derive various locations in Los Angeles where the history has been erased for the purpose of change. After paying visits to these different places of memories, I took the photographs that is this book.
001/ SUNSET BLVD
15
The ideas ruins evoke in me are grand. Everything comes to nothing, everything perishes, everything passes, only the world remains, only time endures. How old is this world! I walk between two eternities.�
–Denis Diderot
002/ Echo park ave
003/ HIGHWAY 101
“We may seem competent, but by the end of next century there will be new deserts, new ruins.”
–Edward Bond
003/ 5th st
“It seems, in fact, that the more advanced a society is, the greater will be its interest in ruined things, for it it will see in them a redemptively sobering reminder of the fragility of its own achievements. Ruins pose a direct challenge to our concern with power and rank, with bustle and fame. They punctured the inflated folly of our exhaustive and frenetic pursuit of wealth
–Alain De Botton
“These are the degrees of fate which have overthrown empires! These are the celestial anathems which have smitten these walls once so glorious, and converted the splendor of a populous city into a solitutde of morning and of ruins!”
–Constantin Francois De Volney