Looking for Los Angeles: Architecture, Film, Photography, and the Urban Landscape (Issues & Debates)

Looking for Los Angeles: Architecture, Film, Photography, and the Urban Landscape (Issues & Debates) by Salas, Charles. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780892366163.

Often referred to as the city of the future, Los Angeles is known for its sprawl, its constant change, and its special relationship to the film industry. The twelve contributors to Looking for Los Angeles focus on dramatic shifts in the urban landscape, important moments in the citys architectural history, and the role of the image in this mecca of image makers. Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom searches for Los Angeless center and finds a city that "breaks itself down, builds itself up again, displaces and regroups itself" and where "freedom of movement" is a basic premise of life. Historian Philip Ethington documents the citys changing character in both text and images, urban studies professor Dana Cuff exposes the demise of once-thriving urban neighborhoods to make way for Modernist housing projects, and anthropologist Susan A. Phillips invites us on a personal journey into "the projects" to meet gang members and their families today. Artist Robbert Flick offers a sixteen-page, full-color photo-essay that takes us on a "drive-by" along Alameda Avenue, architectural historian Thomas S. Hines traces Frank Lloyd Wrights influence on the life and career of photographer Edmund Teske, and film historian Robert L. Carringer examines Los Angeles as a setting for Hollywood feature films.