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HOLLYWOODLAND #23

Collection

HOLLYWOODLAND: VOLUME TWO

Creator

Bryony Shearmur

Description

I have been living in Los Angeles for two decades. Transplanted from London, I have watched my adopted city ebb and flow, and all the while I have discreetly pointed a camera at my surroundings. This collection was not started with any intention, quite the opposite. It was a way for me to shoot without an agenda. I allowed myself to shoot without rules but within parameters. My self-imposed parameters were simple. Shoot only with my phone, shoot anything I was moved to shoot, and place no judgment on the result, at all.  It was stream-of-consciousness shooting, an antidote to social media and my commercial work. I have been a documentarian and street photographer for as long as I can remember, but this work existed outside of my usual practice. At the beginning of this year when I entered the nft space, I began the process of looking through and editing the multitude of files I had been carefully storing on an ever-growing stack of hard drives. There are thousands of them. They tell the story of a city. They are a portrait of LA. The idea for diptychs was simple enough, some of the images just cried out for a partner, so I started to let them pair themselves up into short stories. Over the twenty years that I have been living in LA, I have been witness to a great deal of change, these days the city I live in is not the city I arrived in. I am one of those outliers who doesn’t drive in Los Angeles, I find being on foot gives me a different perspective of the city and its people.  Sometimes it is jarring, other times spellbinding, but always it is interesting. I see the underbelly, the everyday, the mundane, the dirt, the hopes and dreams both realized and dashed. I catalog everything. None of the images are meant to shock or shame, they are just what I see. It takes courage to live in a city where so many people are brushing up against one another, where the air is filled to capacity with big ideas. I find the people bold and brilliant. The extremes that I see are about as different as possible, one day I am enjoying the very best the city has to offer, and the next I am on the metro watching a pretty girl doing whippets, riding the line from one end to the other. I don’t know how long I will stay in LA. I miss the English weather and these days my need is for some peace and quiet. But while I am here I will continue to collect images and drink in this place in all its glory. All images are shot digitally.