Adrian Gaut: Wilshire Blvd

Wilshire Boulevard is one of Los Angeles’s transportation lifelines, and as close as one gets in the sprawling metropolis to a Main Street. Running east-to-west from downtown to the ocean, Wilshire is a link from late-nineteenth-century L.A. to the explosive growth of this city in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Fascinated by its history, New York-based photographer Adrian Gaut pays tribute to L.A.‘s most famous strip in his unique framing of architectural details. Gaut’s photographs evoke the 100-year-plus history of L.A.’s growth through rigorous documentation of the boulevard starting with One Wilshire in downtown L.A. and ending with traffic cones that divide the Pacific Coast Highway. In between–the Art Deco details of Miracle Mile, the 1980s reflective glass facades of Century City and the midcentury modern architecture omnipresent throughout the entire strip–is captured in more than 100 color and black-and-white semi-abstract compositions. A brilliant way to mark a time and place in Southern California in the early 21st century.