LAX: Photographs of Los Angeles 1980–84 is a photography book comprised of two series of black-and-white images of a metropolis that has now vanished.
In the first series, “LAX”, photographer John Brian King engaged in street-style photography in one of the city’s most charged places: Los Angeles International Airport. Harried travelers, uniformed employees, and vacationers appear angered by the flash of King’s camera, too bored to care, or all-too-confident in this post-industrial setting. King’s series would be impossible today, as it exposes the uncomfortable chaos of airport existence before an era of obligatory surveillance.
In the second series, “LA”, King photographed a city at night devoid of people. The photographs have an evidentiary quality: bizarre debris are framed in the center, isolated by a high-intensity flash. King captured these artifacts – from Sunset Strip nightclub posters to archaic ATMs to beautiful Hollywood Art Deco statues – with a blunt, direct aesthetic.
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