In the decades after the Second World War, the Mexican fan palm became a fixture of the Los Angeles horizon. Planted along sidewalks, it grew into a kind of civic shorthand: the original skyscraper of a city that spreads outward rather than upward, its silhouette repeated so often in film, television, advertising and music that it ceased to describe a place and began to stand in for one. Marie-José Jongerius takes that shorthand as her subject rather than her backdrop.

For the book, Jongerius returned to the most iconic and historic sites in the Los Angeles area and photographed the palms found there — the same trees, and the same species, whose accumulated photographic and cinematic life produced the city’s familiar image. The result is a study of how a landscape is learned: how a plant becomes a symbol, and what remains of the actual plant once the symbol has been widely distributed.

Fw:Books published the volume in Amsterdam in 2017 as a hardcover of 48 pages, with colour plates and a poster, designed by Hans Gremmen. Jared Farmer contributes text, placing the pictures within a longer account of the palm’s place in the Southern California city. The compact extent is deliberate: the book withholds the survey in favour of the specific view, and the design treats the sequence as an argument about repetition and recognition rather than as a portfolio of scenery.

Jongerius’s wider practice returns to sites that carry a heavy image burden — places already photographed into familiarity — and asks what can still be seen there. Los Angeles Palms belongs to that project. For collectors of photobooks that examine the machinery of landscape representation, or of the West Coast as photographed subject, it is a considered, tightly edited example of the form.