Description
Known for over a decade simply as @angelenoheart, Henry Lara’s work is finally printed and bound for readers everywhere to add to their collection. Inspired by the city’s grittiest corners between 2015 – 2025, the book features vivid black and white photography that jumps off the page of its own accord, only to be lifted even higher by words that are often prose, but also poetry and occasionally fiction. The result offers stories that are as much for the streets as they are for our local libraries and state archives; and while Lara won’t be credited for saving any of the lives of his subjects in VIDAS, he will definitely be hailed for dignifying them as a pure Angeleno, an achievement that only a smattering of his contemporaries can claim alongside him.
In addition to brilliant portrait photography, the book is a fervent starting point for anyone who makes their way through Los Angeles today and wonders how so much poverty and ruin could take hold here. Whether in MacArthur Park, where rampant drug addiction coexists with the hustle and bustle of Central American immigrants, or in downtown Los Angeles, where the displaced residents of Bunker Hill still make their routes over its gentrifying stretches, or in Southeast Los Angeles, where disinvestment policies nearly left small mom and pop shops there for dead, Lara’s chronicles boldly capture the contradictions of the American Dream for anyone who, like himself, is daring enough to meet and learn from them.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.