LA Story

Can you please move all the LA Story images into a portfolio called “LA Story”? Here is the series statement for this group of images:
This series was originally shot for Holiday magazine, a French travel publication with a long history, in which each issue is dedicated to a particular place. This one was California.

Growing up in New Zealand, a long way from the glossy world of Los Angeles and Hollywood, my idea of California was much like the one I imagine many people have: movie stars, swimming pools, sunshine and a certain kind of glamour. Having spent a lot of time there over the years, mostly through work, I’ve come to know a different side of it. Something less polished. The practicalities of everyday life in a sprawling city, the monotony of sitting in traffic, the strange isolation of feeling alone while living alongside twenty million other people.

For the editorial, we played with a little 80s nostalgia, but wanted to avoid making it feel too constructed. The idea was to follow someone through the course of a day, allowing the story to unfold with a loose, almost reportage quality. A portrait of California that sits somewhere between the place we imagine and the place that actually exists.

-Gregory Harris