Entries tagged 'city hall'

wow, i’m dumb. here we are practically on the eve of the next large protests about immigrant rights, and i just noticed that i left this write-up of the last one as a draft.

i made it out to today’s “mass student march against racist legislation” while my fiancée celia stayed home to work. going through my pictures afterward, it was another instance where a theme emerged that i hadn’t been all that conscious of while i was shooting: signs at the hr4437 student protest. not quite very shot is of a sign — i had to take the obligatory shot of a child on someone’s shoulders, holding a flag.

the most telling moment of the day for me was when this older latino gentleman and his wife turned around and started walking out, and he said to me as he passed by, “this is bullshit, this isn’t why i came.” what was on stage at the time was a couple of kids, one sporting a che guevara shirt, who were dealing with the music that were trying to rap to cutting out, and dropping a few “motherfuckers” into their overly broad take on current events.

it’s those sorts of central-casting leftists and strategic tone-deafness that makes my support of these protests wane, along with the presence of groups like fnla (a political party from el salvador with a less-than-savory past), the mexica movement, and the perpetual organizing presence of answer.

dave bullock was there and took his usual assortment of crowd shots. celia’s roommate lucas also snuck up on me, so you may see one of his pictures pop up in a newspaper somewhere.

i had one last walking tour pass from my los angeles conservancy membership, so i decided to go on the city hall walking tour. i had a major brain failure and didn’t crank up the iso setting when i started taking pictures inside, so not as many shots turned out as i would have liked. an excuse to go back!

after the tour, i checked out the downtown arts district farmers market. it seems a little smaller than the one near the library, but they’re just getting restarted after moving to little tokyo.

i also stopped in at the little tokyo branch of the los angeles public library, and it has an incredible interior. but i didn’t take any pictures, because i didn’t want to annoy all the people using the library.

we visited city hall today, and checked out the numerous historical photos on the fourth floor. many of them are from the los angeles public library photo collection, including this picture of pershing square (then called central park) from before any of the current buildings around the square existed.

the main reason we were there was to check out “last looks: the ambassador hotel,” a photo exhibition with shots from the ambassador hotel. here’s a los angeles times article about the exhibition. the prints were on the small side, but they were all great. and some are amazing, like the mushrooms growing on carpet that you can see with the article.

and now that i’ve given them as gifts and i won’t be ruining any surprises, i can say that i got calendars from both qoop and lulu using pictures i had taken, and they turned out great.