LA by Car: A Farewell
PHOTOGRAPHS AND TEXT BY
JEFF JACOBSON
PHOTOGRAPHY IS A FUSION of space and time,
so shooting Los Angeles from a car seems right. It
is the vantage point from which most people
experience the city. Indeed, Los Angeles is a city
built to be seen from a car. The billboards on
Sunset Boulevard, the murals on freeway under-
passes and in parking garages, the bus ads, the
huge paintings that adorn Hollywood buildings,
even the ocean and mountains of the Pacific Coast
Highway—they’re all hard to see on foot.
One of the main reasons I left Los Angeles was I
didn’t like spending so much time in the car spew-
ing bad stuff out my rear end. As gasoline
becomes more scarce and expensive, and as alter-
natives that might allow people to continue
traversing the vast spaces of the Los Angeles
Basin are slow to emerge, I wonder how many
people will follow me out the door. Los Angeles
seems an untenable proposition. Just as Los
Angeles became the prototype post–World War II
automobile-based city, it may fall victim to
another paradigm shift: from an era of cheap,
plentiful fuel to one of expensive scarcity. a
Parking Garage, Hollywood
