Book of the day > LAX: Photographs of Los Angeles 1980-84 by John Brian King.  Spurl Editions (@spurleditions). "LAX is comprised of two series of black-and-white images of a metropolis that has now vanished.

 

In the first series, LAX, photographer John Brian King engaged in street-style photography in one of the city’s most charged places: Los Angeles International Airport. Harried travelers, uniformed employees, and vacationers appear angered by the flash of King’s camera, too bored to care, or all-too-confident in this post-industrial setting. King’s series would be impossible today, as it exposes the uncomfortable chaos of airport existence before an era of obligatory surveillance.

 

In the second series, LA , King photographed a city at night devoid of people. The photographs have an evidentiary quality: bizarre debris are framed in the center, isolated by a high-intensity flash. King captured these artifacts – from Sunset Strip nightclub posters to archaic ATMs to beautiful Hollywood Art Deco statues – with a blunt, direct aesthetic. 

 

The black-and-white film negatives of LAX remained in a box for thirty years; they have now reemerged as the unsettling traces of 1980s Los Angeles." $ 35.00