Exhaust

Exhaust – Zach Callahan – The work examines class, solitude and quiet, everyday moments captured while walking through the streets of a city usually discovered by car. It is a combination of portraits, street scenes and observational photographs. ‘I quickly realised that there were often two different ways of experiencing Los Angeles – public or private, at street level or on a viaduct, in an air-conditioned car or through the window of a bus. When I first started photographing, I wanted to make this work to explore this disparity and describe what the social landscape looks like for people navigating the dusty streets, public transport hubs and desolate pavements of a city notoriously dominated by the car. The Los Angeles revealed in these images is not the expected representation of the Los Angeles we all know, but a parallel world of working-class outcasts and quiet everyday dwellers. The loneliness is perhaps the result of my own psychology and the type of people and things that attract me, people who seem to carry a burden but who also call for calm, contemplation and empathy.’