LA Night #1

2002

* Hans-Christian Schink studied photography in Leipzig in the 1980s--”East German times,” he says--and came to Los Angeles in 2002 for a residency at Villa Aurora, the Pacific Palisades landmark and foundation dedicated to German American cultural exchange. Like the wartime refugees who had bought the villa, Schink found the city surpassingly strange. His photographs reveal the degree to which he couldn’t reconcile the impressions Los Angeles had left on him.

On the one hand, he went to the desolate city limits at high noon and made views that were almost blinded by the light--blown-out pictures he took with a large-format camera. On the other, he photographed the heart of the city in the dead of night with a hand camera. These images were panoramic despite their tiny negatives. When he printed them, he enlarged the film and then enlarged the enlargement until he was working with only a one-centimeter square of the original negative. The example above is so grainy that you can hardly discern the back of a car at a traffic light. L.A. is like that, Schink feels: The harder you stare at it, the more it dissolves before your eyes.