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ASPHALT POETRY
Vanity Plate Photographs
In their natural habitat, Vanity Plates are ephemeral, speedy and literary. Like Butterflies
I arrived in Los Angeles a confirmed pedestrian. I learned how to drive at age sixteen in Minneapolis, but left immediately for boarding school in Northern Arizona where I learned to appreciate the landscape on foot. I didn't own a car in college – Cambridge was inhospitable to automobiles whether moving or parked. While attending MIT, I lived in the North End of Boston, a terrible place to try and park a car. The “boot” and the occasional torched vehicle kept me on my feet, the “T” and a colleague's childhood bicycle – a marvel with a back wheel that wavered like a potato chip. |
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I moved from Manhattan, where pedestrians rule, to Los Angeles and endured a crash course in car culture. Not only did I have to purhcase and drive a car, but I had to maintain it. I learned that “detail” referred to a spa-like treatment to pamper the car, which, while it is no doubt pleasing to the car, is both expensive and inconvenient for the car's owner. I resisted. I wasn't against motorized transport, my life in Manhattan included subways, busses, taxis and elevators, but in Los Angeles, even my elevator use plummeted. My first jobs there were in single story, single business buildings. Instead of entering a forty-one story building and transporting myself UP with an assortment of fellow workers (all strangers) I would venture from home to desk insulated by my car and our company parking lot. There was no reason to brush against anyone outside of my circle. But then I discovered Vanity Plates. At lunch time I accompanied my car to the neighboring shopping center and found the characters I longed to know in my new city: CNTESSA, EMPRES, ROKSTR, HUMAN, RAVEN and ROADWRR. I had no need of psychics or horoscopes, I consulted the flow of traffic for answers: YYYYYS, NONNON, YAH MON, JSTSYNO, JS DO IT, or, the best advice of all: MUT8NOW.
I was hooked and put a camera in my car to collect these fleeting urban butterflies. A lunch break in a Marina del Rey shopping mall became a hunting expedition; suburban parking lots beckoned offering ALCAMY, PURPSSS and OMENS. A blah day was transformed by the discovery of ZIGGITY, BBOOMBA or FLIVVVR. I started reading, and imagining, phrases formed by chance juxtapositions, asphalt poetry woven randomly from the moving traffic. A mobile mobile. These photographs date from 1983 to 1989.
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