Los Angeles Times features my book
Each weekend I look forward to Los Angeles’ arts and cultural maven Carolina Miranda’s newsletter Essential Arts, which she writes for the Los Angeles Times. I was absolutely honored to have my book STEP and REPEAT be her lead feature last week. And was also delighted to learn that we both have been low-key obsessed with the Dr. Dr. Lee sign for years (I also used to chronicle the sign on Twitter with the #smileinthesky hashtag).
I’ve copied and pasted the feature here and you can also view it on LA Time’s website. #DTLAWalkabout 4eva!
Artist Sacha Halona Baumann makes a portrait of downtown L.A. one (literal) step at a time
Sacha Halona Baumann has collected her images of downtown L.A. in her artist book, “Step and Repeat.”
BY CAROLINA A. MIRANDA COLUMNIST
APRIL 22, 20238 AM PT
Walkabout
“I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour,” wrote Rebecca Solnit in her 2001 book “Wanderlust: A History of Walking.” “If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.”
For artist Sacha Halona Baumann, walking is not only locomotive, it is where she clears her mind by examining the city’s ever-changing landscape. That‘s downtown Los Angeles, the neighborhood she has inhabited since the early 1990s and assiduously recorded — first with cameras, now an iPhone. “I’ll often walk randomly,” she says. “I’ll turn when a light changes. I take the subway three times a week. And my eyes will drift to something repeatedly and I’ll notice changes.”
That shifting downtown landscape is at the core of her book, “Step and Repeat,” published last year, which gathers hundreds of images captured between 2014 and 2022 exclusively on a smartphone.
Sacha Halona Baumann often captures the unexamined corners of the city.
These are not grand images of the L.A. skyline with its recognizable architectural icons. Instead, they are quickly snapped smartphone pics that zero in on the small details that Baumann observes on her walks: the pattern of a brick wall, the shadows cast by a fire hydrant studded with an array of knobs, a faded graphic of roasted chickens, a hand-painted sign laced with eyes that offers gold barato barato — cheap cheap.
Some of these details might seem mundane. But as you pore over her book, the forms begin to repeat — like those knobby fire hydrants or the baroque facade of the Los Angeles Theatre, the faded-yet-glamorous 1931 movie palace designed by S. Charles Lee and S. Tilden Norton. Though the subjects of her photos reoccur, they are never the same. Sometimes the light is stark; other times it has been diffused by morning fog. At times, the shadows are long; at others, barely perceptible. Here you might see the facade of a theater; elsewhere you’ll find the industrial backside.
One repeating theme is the image of scorpion pendants in jewelry store windows. Baumann, who is a Scorpio, says , “Scorpios are sort of like vegans — they like it when everybody knows it.” (As a fellow Scorpio, I can confirm this.)
A handmade sign advertises the sale of gold in downtown Los Angeles in a photograph by Sacha Halona Baumann.
The artist’s images do not obscure downtown L.A.’s more brutal aspects: the inhuman scale of its loading docks or the myriad architectural barriers that are erected to purportedly protect the city from its people. But neither do they exploit or fetishize the city’s grit. The pictures are straightforward and sympathetic. As Baumann puts it: “I think of them as being generous.”
In the same way that she lets certain limitations shape some of her walks downtown — such as simply turning if she is unable to cross a street — she likewise set a series of arbitrary conditions for “Step and Repeat.” One, she only selected photos dating back to 2014 because that’s how far back she has smartphone images warehoused on her iCloud account. And the book’s length — 480 pages — was determined by the maximum allowable by Blurb, the service she used to publish the work.
Images were then chosen at random, though once these were selected, she organized them in ways that create interesting juxtapositions of color and form.
“You can open it up to any page and you can find a story,” she says.
Baumann also works as a curator, art consultant and graphic designer. For two years, she published the arts broadsheet “Full Blede” featuring the work of artists — mostly imagery, but also short stories, essays and poems.
On Saturday, 17 images from her downtown series — devoted to orange traffic cones — will be on display at the Brand Library and Art Center in Glendale as part of the group show “Don’t Believe Everything You Think.” Also on display will be a copy of the book.
Images are paired by color in a spread from Sacha Halona Baumann’s “Step and Repeat.”
But it’s worth hanging out with her book beyond the gallery, sitting with it, revisiting it and letting the little corners of L.A. engage in their relentless chatter.
Appearing more than once in Baumann’s book is an image of a dental billboard that features a smiling mouth rising from a building’s rooftop. It’s Cheshire Cat-like grin is unconnected to any face and depending on the angle, the mouth can feel friendly or strained — L.A.’s answer to the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg, the fictional billboard that plays an all-seeing role in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.”
The dental billboard — for the practice of one Dr. Lee — is one I’ve long been fascinated by and have, in fact, photographed in the past.
What is the mouth trying to tell us? The answer to that depends on when or how you look.
“Don’t Believe Everything You Think,” curated by Galia Linn, opens at the Brand Library 6 p.m. Saturday. Find details at brandlibrary.art. You can find Sacha Halona Baumann’s “Step and Repeat” available for purchase at sachabaumann.com.