Steidlville

Boulevard is a visual tale of two disparate cities: Paris and Los Angeles. In the early seventies, Adam Bartos began to use color photography to document the contemporary urban landscape, infusing his images with a certain quietude and finding composition in even the most random corners of life. He often focused his lens on his native New York, and he published a monumental series of photographs of the modern architecture of the United Nations. In the late seventies, and then again in the early eighties, Bartos traveled to Los Angeles and Paris, taking his camera with him. The two trips would have a strong and lasting impact on his vision, and yet until recently, he had never considered the two cities — or bodies of work — together.

In Boulevard, an intriguing dialogue takes place before our eyes. This is not the L.A. or Paris of postcards. As we venture through the scarcely inhabited hotel rooms, backyards, gas stations, and inevitably, city streets, we are struck by the graphical relationships and the surprisingly similar color palates. There is a magnetic attraction and repulsion between these two photo series and cities — polar opposites that, at unexpected moments, converge and suddenly attract.
With a preface by Geoff Dyer, whose essays and works of fiction include But Beautiful, Paris Trance, and Out of Sheer Rage. The Ongoing Moment, a book about photography, will be published in October 2005.