Wilshire Blvd
Photographs by Adrian Gaut
Introduction by Felix Burrichter
The almost sixteen-mile-long boulevard, which originates in downtown L.A. and carves its way to the coast through some of L.A.’s most important neighborhoods—including Koreatown, Miracle Mile, Beverly Hills, and Westwood—is one of the city’s most important traffic arteries. And as one of the oldest routes in L.A., with origins dating back centuries to the indigenous Tongva people, Wilshire Boulevard reads as a palimpsest of the city’s urban and architectural development, a rarity in a town that is obsessed with erasing the past and starting from scratch. Far from the clichés of an L.A. lifestyle, where images of pools and palm trees gloss over urban reality, Wilshire Boulevard has served architectural realness throughout its historic development. Since the late nineteenth-century, when real estate magnate Henry Gaylord Wilshire donated to the city a strip of land to build the boulevard, Wilshire has functioned as the backdrop for L.A.’s urban life—a veritable stage of asphalt and concrete, simultaneously raw and theatrical.
From the Introduction by Felix Burrichter
Wilshire Boulevard is one of Los Angeles’s transportation lifelines, and as close as one gets in the sprawling metropolis to a Main Street. Running east-to-west from downtown to the ocean, Wilshire is a link from late-19th-century L.A. to the explosive growth of this city in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. Fascinated by its history, New York– based photographer Adrian Gaut pays tribute to L.A.’s most famous strip in his unique framing of architectural details. Gaut’s photographs evoke the 100-year-plus of L.A.’s history and growth through rigorous documentation of the boulevard starting with One Wilshire in downtown L.A. and ending with traffic cones that divide the Pacific Coast Highway. In between—the Art Deco details of Miracle Mile, the 1980s reflective glass facades of Century City and the midcentury modern architecture omnipresent throughout the entire strip—is captured in over 100 color and black-and-white semi-abstract compositions. A brilliant way to mark a time and place in Southern California in the early 21st century.
Price: US $50
ISBN: 978-0-9859958-8-1
Hardcover
8.5 x 11.25” (216 x 286 mm)
180 pages
200 color illustrations
Release date: October 2017
Wilshire Boulevard is published in a limited edition of 1,000 copies.