Back in May, I surmised that this pair of walls - the Aztec chief, the luscious papaya - might make a very good case history for my Visual Studies course. Undoubtedly that's true: they could have found their way into today's class alongside the old adobe in Olvera Street, variegated old movie theater fronts on Broadway, six separate street views of the same area of LA with six different types of tree planing, a picture of President Nikias bowing to pictures of the two Chinese students who were murdered at the end of last semester, or the fountain in front of Doheny. Types of evidence, all (we discussed of what); and all examples of visual knowledge that couldn't be completed or contextualized without non-visual material.
But this image, for me, is above all evidence of a gappy memory. Yes, I had a vague idea as I took this picture (through my windshield, at lights), that I'd looked at the images before. But I had to trawl and trawl through past entries - and then, after all, it was only four months ago. A horizontal, not a vertical frame: what I can't answer is what determined that choice, and why it is that the lighting as well as the angle turns it into a different scene.
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