Adam Bartos: Boulevard

Boulevard is a visual tale of two disparate cities: Paris and Los Angeles. In the early 1970s Adam Bartos began to use color photography to document the contemporary urban landscape, infusing his images with a quiet calm and finding composition in even the most random corners. He often focused his lens on his native New York and published a monumental series of photographs examining the modern architecture of the United Nations. In the late 1970s and then again in the early 1980s, Bartos traveled to Los Angeles and to Paris. These two influential trips would have a strong and lasting impact upon his vision. And yet, until recently, Bartos had never considered the two cities--or bodies of work--together. In this book, an intriguing dialogue takes place before our eyes. As we venture through the scarcely inhabited hotel rooms, backyards, gas stations, and, inevitably, city streets, we are struck by the graphical relationships, the surprisingly similar color palate between the two. There is a magnetism and repulsion operating here polar opposites--in art and life--that at unexpected moments converge and suddenly attract. Novelist, essayist and travel writer Geoff Dyer examines the two.