What does Los Angeles look like when you are not moving through it at sixty miles per hour? That question, posed by Ayda Gragossian, drives North North South, published by GOST Books in 2025. Over four years, Gragossian—an Iranian American artist—walked the city rather than drove it, photographing store windows, parking lots, and suburban houses that rarely register from behind a windshield. Her black-and-white photographs contain no people. The omission is deliberate: without figures to anchor them, these motifs of everyday architecture and signage take on an unsettling quiet, as if the city were being seen against its own mythologies.

The title comes from a photograph of a broken freeway sign, and it gathers the book’s central preoccupations: the American habit of traversing vast distances by car, the inequalities that infrastructure quietly sustains, and photography’s capacity to make the banal poetic. Los Angeles, as Gragossian pictures it, is not the glossy backdrop of the entertainment industry but a working-class metropolis of eighty-eight incorporated cities where sharply different realities sit side by side. Her sequence insists on that proximity, allowing a single facade or hand-painted sign to interrupt the patterns of conformity around it.

GOST Books has produced the volume as a hardback, with 104 pages and 52 images. The photographs were made across different neighbourhoods, and the book preserves something of that drift—its narrative unfolds at a walking pace, inviting sustained attention rather than the quick scan of a contact sheet.

For readers drawn to contemporary documentary practice, North North South offers a considered counter-image to Los Angeles as it is usually pictured. Gragossian’s four-year engagement with the city rewards the kind of looking its own photographs demand: unhurried, patient, alert to what motion obscures.