Towering

Towering
phone lines and palm trees line the streets;
swimsuit-clad, sun-soaked women line the poolsides- Los Angeles,
the City of Angels, home to long stretches of freeways, beaches and
dreamers. The idea and image of L.A. is familiar, whether you’ve
lived there for twenty years or haven’t even stepped foot on its
soil. It is the monotony of L.A. that so entraps those who live
there and the lines and stretches that keep people moving forward,
striving for the next bigger and better thing. Los Angeles gives an
allusion that it never ends, that there’s always more to come;
those who live there get sucked in to the idea.

Cyrus Mahboubian is a British artist based in London
particularly known for his work with polaroid photography.
Previously, his work has been featured in shows worldwide and he
has taught workshops at Tate Britain and the The Photographers’
Gallery. Mahboubian’s latest project took him to Los Angeles,
California where he shot the endless array of palms and phone lines
that stripe L.A. streets. He equates the “emotional power” of
polaroid photos to “a handwritten letter or a ticket stub”, as they
are moments in time captured in physical form. He explained,
“conceptually, the main thing for me is that polaroids are
originals; each one is unique and, unlike other photography, isn’t
printed later…Each photo can be thought of as an object that has
travelled.”

These polaroids capture moments in a city that’s always speeding
by. It freezes viewers in a dreamlike moment, the very type of
dream that inspires people to seek out L.A. in the first place. The
images epitomise fleeting moments of the ‘American Dream’, bottling
up the heat of Californian sun, the sight of poolside beauties and
the infamous palm trees that dot the city. The contemporary world
and landscape is captured in a nostalgic, old school art form,
highlighting the surreal nature of this town.

@cyrusartist |
mahboubian.com