Tone Poem

This project explores emotional and architectural tensions embedded in Los Angeles, where light and shadow, beauty and isolation, coalesce within the city’s fabric. Through fragmented urban details—light sources, building textures, and shadows—the images strive to capture both intimacy and estrangement, tracing the shifting relationship between place and self. The golden hour’s fleeting warmth gives way to the stark reality of concrete, glass, and steel, revealing a city that both seduces and alienates. To deepen this interplay, lines of poetry—presented in fragmented parts—are overlaid onto the images themselves, echoing the ubiquitous presence of typography across Los Angeles’ visual landscape. Billboards, neon, faded hand-painted signs—text is inescapable here, layering meaning over the built environment just as the poem layers itself onto these photographs. In these quiet corners and overlooked textures, the work captures Los Angeles not as a fixed identity, but as a reflection of desire, memory, and discontent.