Having grown up in Germany, California with its wide highways, oceans, stunning natural beauty and palm trees, social freedom and all year sun was like another world to me. Today, having lived in San Francisco and spent time in Palm Springs and LA, it still seems surreal, as does most of America with its bright bright sun in most states, even in winter. Of course these phantasies that we grow up with are just that. They speak nothing of what is really happening on the socio economic, political and civic level. This project is in many ways a self indulgent pandemic project, outdoors, aesthetically driven, it resurrects a trope of architectural photography that reminds us of Julius Shulman, Richard Neutra and all those German and swiss immigrant architects whom Julius helped immortalize in his photography. This photography, that of architecture was large format, crisp, black and white, zero point perspective and it was seductive to the magazine pages. It still is. This photography of modernist CA architecture actually preserved the architecture for longer than the architecture itself lasted.

These polaroids then represent a small scale memorial for a phantasy of a California that never really existed and yet still does exist for the privileged few. Yet it’s seduction insistently persists even in these blurry images made with a plastic lens, which in many ways obscures the age of the buildings through the use of the polaroid and black and white as its own trope.