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LA ARCHITECTURE
‘I
love cars and I love Los
Angeles for being a city of
cars,’ declares New York
City-based photographer
Ashok Sinha. Sinha and I recently
had a transatlantic conversation via
video conference, as you do these
days. We were mainly chatting about
the recent publication of his book,
Gas and Glamour.
Gas and Glamour is a stunning
collection of photographs that
celebrate America’s golden age of the
automobile and its associated
roadside architecture. For Sinha, Los
Angeles is synonymous with
car-culture and, over multiple trips
in the past 15 years, he became
increasingly curious about the city’s
love affair with the automobile,
largely because it reminded him of
his own. ‘On every visit, LA amazed
Gas and
glamour
Benedict Brain speaks to Ashok Sinha
about photographing the roadside
architecture of LA
me with its suburban sprawl and
made me jealous of its shiny cars,’
explains Sinha. Sinha was curious
about the communities there and
how they were structured so
differently to where he lives in New
York City. ‘I started to dig deeper
into clues that hint at the
automobile’s influence on the city’s
DNA and I began to discover an
architectural past that was heavily
shaped by the car.’
As a visual repsonse Sinha, who
works as a professional architectural
and fine-art photographer, started to
photograph these roadside buildings.
It turned into a five-year project that
found him obsessively poring
through research material, city
records and blogs to come up with a
representative list of sites to
photograph. ‘The process