Guillaume Zuili — Smoke & Mirrors
L’Œil Urbain
24 Rue Widmer – 91100 Corbeil-Essonnes (FRANCE)
From the 7th of April to the 20th of May 2018
Los Angeles. Many cities brought together, separated by hundreds of kilometers of highways following a horizontal expansion.
Many worlds cohabit without fusing : Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, the Westside almost ignore the existence of a Downtown, even worse : East LA.
Smoke & Mirrors is an expression that means that there is nothing but dust in the eyes. This series, built for over ten years, is a tribute to the “film noir”. An idealized and refined vision of the search of the American myth. Los Angeles seen as a film set, ville-decor, where everything -or almost- is only a photographic illusion. I used the pinhole to erase the details that were too realistic and to keep just the soul of an imaginary city, dreamed as a film décor.
When I moved to San Pedro in 2017, I discovered a Los Angeles that I had never seen before : a place invested by artists escaping the gentrification of Venice Beach or Downtown. But San Pedro is essentially Los Angeles port. A city where we are either lost or where we can hide. An urban and industrial cacophony where everything mixes. Freeways everywhere, a seesaw of lorries that load and unload products from containers, night and day.
Slowly, the cleanliness has replaced the blurriness of the pinhole.
When myth and reality get together…
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