The Burgers of L.A. I moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles in the late 1990s to take a job working in a museum bookstore. My daily commute from Echo Park to Pasadena involved transitioning through neighborhoods that featured mid-century vernacular architecture particular to the strip malls and Independent burger joints of Northeast Los Angeles. In the early 2000s, as part of a process of acclimating to my new home, I began photographing some of these fast food restaurants. I was drawn to the stark, simple graphic nature of the architectural elements in these structures.
As part of my daily work routine at the museum, I crossed a sculpture garden featuring sculptures by Auguste Rodin. One day I noticed that Rodin’s grouping, “The Burghers of Calais” included a figure that when viewed obliquely, appeared to have two hands holding a hamburger. This was the beginning of my journey into The Burgers of L.A..
I have collected postcards, photographs and other paper ephemera since my early 20s. In two previous creative projects, Thinking Florida Turn Right: A Portfolio of Handcrafted Photographic Post Cards Displaying Seven Different Views from the Florida Landscape (1981), and The Business (1993), I took inspiration from some of the objects in my collection. The physical structure of these objects as souvenir propaganda was distilled into the presentation of the work. The Burgers of L.A. was published in 2024 as a 12-image fold-out postcard portfolio in an edition of 500, featuring an essay by Jeffrey Herr, as a memento of Los Angeles.
Recto-Verso is a photographic project about the process of reading and the connection between the printed book and the human body. The genesis of this project is based on my experience as a museum bookseller as well as a lecture on the connection between books and the body by the art book publisher Sharon Helgason Gallager, given during a period of anxiety about the vulnerability of printed books in an emerging digital era.
In each of these works, the subject is engaged in the act of reading whereby I then physically remove the book from their hands and then take a photograph. The photographs are made in natural light using black and white film in a medium format camera. The processed film is scanned and printed as an archival inkjet print.
The Reader Series is a photographic exploration of the book as physical form, cultural marker, and visual word poem. My approach to artistic process is conceptual in structure but intuitively based and reflects a personal relationship with the subject that I am photographing. At its core, this series of photographs reflects my long-standing fascination with the visual display of language, from the style of type font to its engagement with print and design.
Books speak about the culture and time in which they are created. Their current use and valuation reflects contemporary concerns about technology, information media, and the economy. As books age and deteriorate they mirror our own physical issues about age and decay. The text on the spine, cover or title page becomes a poignant narrative of time, place and meaning.
These photographs are made using sheet film with a view camera. The finished exposure is then scanned and digitally printed. This analog to digital process mirrors many aspects of the contested nature of the printed book. The white space around the photo object emphasizes both material physicality and its absence.
The Business ©1993 Andrew Uchin in collaboration with designer Erica Riggs.
Boy/Girl Culture, excerpted from: Stoltenberg, John, Refusing to Be a Man. New York, Dutton, 1990. His Phobia Aroused, excerpted from: Williams, Linda. Fetishism and Hard Core, from For Adult Users Only. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1989. All other text for this project was excerpted from newsprint media sources, collected from 1991 to 1993. Sources were The Associated Press, The New York Times, Parade Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle and The San Francisco Examiner.
Andrew Uchin
andrewuchin@yahoo.com