In Damaged, Paul Grund turns his lens toward Los Angeles, not as the dream factory or cinematic backdrop, but as a city already destroyed. Echoing photographer Lewis Baltz's bleak observation that Los Angeles "has already been destroyed, then left standing as a warning," the work resists the smooth mythology that usually defines it. Grund's camera moves through a fractured landscape of walls, overpasses, and indifferent geometry, exposing a city built out of disconnection.

Shot almost entirely from inside a moving car, the photographs were born of motion and constraint. There's no time to compose or wait; the images are captured by instinct, like the quick calculations of a skater reading the urban surface. The result is a sequence of moments that oscillate between recognition and accident, a rhythm of vision that mirrors the way we move through cities we don't fully belong to.

Grund's Los Angeles is not one of spectacle or ruin, but of exhaustion. The city appears as a collection of self-contained zones, sun-bleached facades, tangled wires, fences, and concrete boundaries that seem to both protect and exclude. Faces rarely meet the camera; when they do, they carry the fatigue of those who remain invisible in a city designed to be watched.

Cover: Softcover
272 pages
2025
Edited by Paul Grund et Pierre Hourquet