L.A. Crossing gathers photographs that Jens Liebchen made in Los Angeles from the vantage point of a car, the way many of the city’s inhabitants prefer to see it: through the windows of their cars. Working since 2010, he drove thousands of kilometers with a camera, and elements of the rental cars he used are visible in the images. The pictures consider how urban space and a city’s way of life are shaped by dominant forms of mobility, and how cars determine who belongs to society and who is allowed to move around freely. Out of the moving car, Liebchen looks at a city that embodies the opposites of utopia and dystopia. Bathed in the beguiling Californian light, the city appears fictitious and real at the same time; the street becomes a stage, and the photography becomes a kind of still image.
Stephen Shore’s photograph La Brea/Beverly serves as the theoretical starting point for Liebchen’s project. An earlier La Brea Matrix Project grew around that image, and in L.A. Crossing Liebchen reverses the common view, looking back from the street to the city. He neither stops, as Lee Friedlander did in America by Car, nor follows the strict grid of Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip; he drives and drives and drives. The book, published by Hartmann Books in 2022, runs to 96 pages with 46 illustrations. Matthias Harder contributes an essay, and Florian Lamm of Berlin designed the volume. It appears as an embossed hardcover measuring 28 by 32 centimeters, with text in German and English.
The photographs come from a long-term project that has been in the making since 2010, and the book was published alongside Liebchen’s participation in the group exhibition HOLLYWOOD at the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin, which ran from 3 June to 20 November 2022. Liebchen has worked as a freelance photographer since his studies in ethnology, and his works have been exhibited worldwide; the publisher states that they can be found, among others, in the collection of the DZ BANK Kunstsammlung in Frankfurt am Main and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. He lives and works in Berlin and is represented by Springer Gallery.
