The images in this book begin in the desert east of Los Angeles and move west through the city, ending in the Pacific. This general movement towards the west alludes to the thirst for water, as well as to the original expansion of America, which was born in the East and hungrily headed west until it reached the Pacific, thus fulfilling its “manifest” destiny. The people, places, and animals in the book existed before Halpern's camera, but he has stitched these photographs together into a work of fiction or fantasy: a structure, sequence, and editing that, like Los Angeles itself, teeters on the brink. to collapse. the weight of its own strangely shaped mass.
The signed edition includes an additional image plate signed by the artist and affixed to the inside back cover.
Silk-screened hard cover
128 pages
77 color plates
24cm x 29cm
(First edition, Fourth printing)
