Silver Lake Boulevard/Marathon Street, Silver Lake Possibly 1995 - 1996

Madoka Takagi made this photograph, Silver Lake Boulevard/Marathon Street, Silver Lake, using gelatin silver print. It's kind of lovely how she’s thinking about photographic greys, how they make space and how they flatten it out. It feels like the image emerged, not from thin air exactly, but from a soup of tones. I love the sidewalk. It’s almost a classical composition, a formal set-up, but it’s collapsing back into its material reality. I can see how, in her wider practice, she used a similar approach in street scenes, creating this strange sense of time suspended. The composition reminds me of some of the American Tonalists. It’s like a Whistler nocturne relocated to the sunshine of Los Angeles. It's a testament to how artists continually revisit and reinterpret artistic ideas across time.