We’ve all heard stories about Downtown Los Angeles, but what’s really real?
Jett Lara, a self-taught documentary photographer, explores stories of the city's most vulnerable yet resilient inhabitants, all captured while navigating the congested streets on his bike, White Horse. His portraits showcase small miracles amidst the constant chaos and offer a raw and evocative examination of a place that is often misunderstood and therefore ignored.
Blossoming trees juxtapose with broken flesh and lost eyes, revealing a strange type of beauty that illuminates overlooked and forbidden corners. Each image serves as a form of self-discovery and redemption, compensating for a difficult past and forging connections with those who share similar struggles.
Lara’s debut book Dreams & Nightmares, published by NORKWWD, descends into the heart of Downtown Los Angeles — where brutality and beauty intertwine. Available now for pre-order at norkwwd.com.
“Alone on the stage of the photograph we act out dreams and nightmares, donning this or that persona, offering ourselves up to the lens's impassive eye. In doing so we strive to make the apparatus complicit in our desires. The self depicted is neither true nor false but possible, potential; the image provides a meeting ground for the mirroring deceptions of the medium and the pose.
In all its conditionality, all its self-assurance and paradox, the photograph forms a membrane between here and there, now and then, real and imaginary, hope and fear--between self and shadow.” - Aperture magazine 1989
