Thomas Locke Hobbs made the photographs in L.A. Vedute after a walk through Hollywood East, where the strip of ground between two apartment buildings with adjacent driveways called to mind The Ideal City of Urbino, the Renaissance panel painting whose receding lines converge on a single vanishing point and whose streets contain no one. That comparison organizes the book. Working with a large-format camera and a rigorously consistent framing, Hobbs photographs the leftover ground between neighboring buildings: driveways, paths, entrances, walls. These are the lines that divide property and the spaces residents nonetheless share.

Across 272 pages, the negative space of a city accumulates into a study of domestic architecture in Los Angeles. A strict perspective is the subject as much as the method, since each view resolves toward its own vanishing point. The scenes are largely unoccupied, and their emptiness is not incidental; the publisher describes the effect as resembling film sets after the actors have gone. What the photographs expose is a kind of urban connective tissue, conflict and coexistence held in the same frame, and a mood of estrangement that never announces itself.

David Campany contributes a conversation with the photographer, Cynthia Hagstrom edited the text, and Rob van Hoesel designed the book. This is a collaborative publication rather than the product of a single sensibility alone, and the design should be read as part of the argument about how these spaces are seen. The Otastar softcover measures 157 by 240 millimeters, and the book is published in English by The Eriskay Connection.

For collectors drawn to contemporary documentary practice, L.A. Vedute is notable for the discipline of its premise: one city, one spatial condition, pursued across a substantial sequence. It belongs on the same shelf as photobooks that treat the ordinary built environment as a problem of vision, and its consistency of framing rewards slow, comparative looking over time.