The Errant Æsthete

Certain spatial fears seem endemic to the modern metropolis, and Los Angeles defines this term in ways that no other American city can approximate. This amorphous skein of strip malls, gated developments, highway entrances and exit ramps, lays unfurled over the landscape like a sheet over a cadaver. Surely the earth is dead beneath the sheer weight and breadth of this built form?

In this series, photographer David Maisel creates highly detailed aerial photographs of the densely packed sprawl of Los Angeles. In its frenzy to expand, the city creates topographies of alienation, fear, and despair. Indeed, Los Angeles is emblematic of an idea of modern space that is linked to an increasing sense of collective societal anxiety.

The invention of radical concepts of urban space was a theme central to the early twentieth century avant-garde, who called for modernity to escape from the constraints of history. We now know, in ways once thought unimaginable, that we cannot escape history. These aerial images describe a potentially desecrated urban fabric, even as they transcribe the commonplace. Indeed, in the post-9/11 age we now occupy, chaos and catastrophe seem implicit in the urban aerial view. To surveil and record the city from the air seems nearly to approach an act of civil disobedience. The images cannot help but serve as portent or prophesy of some future conflagration.

Is this the reason for the unease, the hint of claustrophobia and synthetic terror that these pictures elicit? Or is it the endlessness of the expanse, the multiplying nothingness that fills frame after frame, the city metastasizing ceaselessly, which causes a sense of rising dread? [Link]