EVAN WHALE

Evan Whale | The End of Sunset

Just west of downtown Los Angeles sits a neighborhood colloquially called The Forgotten Edge. I’ve lived there as a renter for the past sixteen years. Like many neighborhoods in Los Angeles, it exists in a space of in-betweenness: where Echo Park, Angelino Heights, Chinatown and Downtown all collide. It’s where the famed Sunset Boulevard comes to an abrupt and unceremonious end, lost on the map in a tangle of freeway on-and off-ramps.

Within the last five years, The Forgotten Edge has been remembered. An ever-accelerating erasure of local spaces and community gathering places has ensued, creating gaping holes in the neighborhood and the collective memory of its residents. It’s a phenomenon that local cultural historian Norman M. Klein calls the “Phantom Limb,” where an empty lot on Sunset Boulevard becomes a momentary ruin, like a “toothless mouth held wide open.”

Drawing from artifacts, archival materials, as well as my own selectively-destroyed photographs, The End of Sunset is a visual document that asks what the impact of such erasures will have on the future of our city, and what if anything can be done to keep the animating force of Los Angeles alive.