Ashok Sinha
New York City
Ashok Sinha creates large-scale photographs that capture a sense of place tied to natural and built environments.
MessageCollection: Gas & Glamour
I love cars and I love Los Angeles for being a city of cars. Over the last decade or so, I have been intrigued by LA's love affair with the automobile, tracing back to a time when cars themselves were objects of beauty. Those cars are no longer on the streets today but the buildings from that era remain. My interest in this story is primarily about this car culture's manifestation within the city's built environment, where there was once a time when the car and the act of driving was celebrated, and these streets once allowed a unified mental image of an urban texture to be retained - a sense which is now improbable and destroyed by freeway architecture, which has reduced entire communities to a name on the exit sign.
I wanted to connect with that lost design history and capture LA's car-culture-induced optimism and ambition reflected in polychromatic, star-spangled coffee shops, gas stations, car washes, and others that once lured the gaze of passing motorists.
This series was published as a book in 2020. For more information and signed copies, please visit https://gasandglamour.com
All images © Ashok Sinha. No Usage Rights of Any Kind Granted Without Written Permission.