Colin Marshall sits down in Koreatown with Noé Montes, photographer and publisher of El Aleph Books. They discuss what MacArthur Park, that place “beyond any laws or organization,” means to him; what difference the much-discussed light of Los Angeles makes for a photographer; the city’s sunsets, beaches, palm trees, and the ultimate fact of its being “kind of ugly”; the New Yorker who told him he “just doesn’t get” Los Angeles; the pleasures of living in a city that doesn’t need defending; the impossible task he once considered upon photographing each and every block; the “synoptic vision” he gained upon seeing Los Angeles as a Borges-style “aleph”; when the LAPD took him up in a helicopter, and what understanding of the city he gained thereby; how Los Angeles works best at two levels, the very macro and the very micro; the “layering of information” in the city’s built environment; his work with Metro, an organization now in the process of “actually connecting the city”; how he first gained an awareness of Los Angeles. growing up in the agricultural parts of California, as a place from which others fled; the importance of the desert, not just as a photographic subject but as a boundary to the city; the contrast in pace and sense of possibility he found upon coming here from New York; the feeling that the definition of Los Angeles is happening right now; his realization, after becoming a full-time photographer, that “this is all I could have done”; the “extraordinary access to be nosy” provided by photography (and indeed interviewing) that allows him to discover the unknown “great work” going on in the city; the vast amounts of money he’s seen poured into photographic ephemeralities; the African family he once saw holding hands before a giant pyramid of cereal; the “failed modernism” and other supremely photographable qualities of Mexico City; and what we can learn about Los Angeles from the photography it produces.
Download the interview here as an MP3 or on iTunes.
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