Image courtesy of Ayda Gragossian.

Ayda Gragossian and I naturally bonded over our photographic explorations of Los Angeles.

In North North South, her new book with GOST, I was struck by the extraordinary coexistence of stillness and the omnipresent buzz of the city that I have called home since 2019.

North North South furthers the conversation on what it means and takes to make sense of a city where function and efficiency far outweigh design. In other words, her work seems to point to the preconditions of what keeps L.A. together as a functioning, hospitable megapolis, and the repercussions its gluttonous infrastructure inflicts on the landscape, people’s belongings.

No one is to be found in her images, and that’s certainly for the better. As the artist mentions: “This book is my attempt to bring forward what’s usually overlooked.” In her mostly all-vertical image sequence, the viewer steps right into what high travel speeds leave blurry: the blunt physical reality of L.A. Here it stands front and center. While humans recede to infinity, carefully selected manifestations of their activity act as reflections of their last known trajectory. Pictures evoke the seminal Crowded Vacancy show of 1971, a sort of precursor to the New Topographics of 1975. Hence, if there’s no one to be seen in Gragossian’s pictures, it’s because humans are everywhere.

The aging infrastructure of asphalt, concrete, and stucco stands alongside signs, billboards, and nomenclature that all insist on function, visibility, and efficiency. An industrial version of Henri Bergson’s élan vital seems to percolate every frame. Space is plenty in L.A., and yet everywhere one turns, space is littered with the byproducts of L.A.’s insatiable metabolism.

Accidents, fringes, and outliers complete the flowing sequence of North North South, and remind us about the colossal environmental footprint of the city.

What follows is our conversation recorded in Westwood, CA, in September 2025.

©Ayda Gragossian’s North North South, published by GOST, 2025.

Yogan Muller: Ayda, North North South was just released by GOST as a sumptuous photobook. It is available for order on their website (https://gostbooks.com/en-us/products/north-north-south). Walk us through how you began this project.

Ayda Gragossian: This book began as a personal journey, but also as a reflection on how challenging it is to represent a place as complex and multifaceted as Los Angeles. After living in England while completing my MFA at Oxford, I returned to Los Angeles with a renewed curiosity and a sense of unfinished business. Despite having lived here for a decade, my understanding of the city had been narrowly shaped by the orbit of home, work, and school. Coming back, I felt compelled to look beyond the clichés that dominate both popular culture and my own limited experience.

I started carrying my camera everywhere. I didn’t set out with a thesis or fixed narrative. Instead, I followed what caught my attention. Many of the photographs come from ordinary corners of the city, spaces so prosaic they’re almost invisible. That anonymity was precisely what intrigued me. Los Angeles is one of the most mythologized cities in the world, either for its glamour or its harsher realities, such as its housing crisis. I wasn’t interested in confirming such a binary. This book is my attempt to bring forward what’s usually overlooked.

But this process also produced some frustration. The city is saturated with different kinds of visual noise — billboards, signage, endless screens — that steal our attention. Everything seems designed to sell you not only products but versions of yourself. In a place so obsessed with reinvention, the mundane physical environment often feels forgotten or neglected, so photographing became both a practice of attentiveness and a form of quiet resistance. To pause, notice, and give weight to the everyday was a way of countering the spectacle. If Los Angeles is typically narrated through excess and fantasy, I wanted to propose an alternative narrative, one rooted in fragments and the beauty of the ordinary.

Image courtesy of Ayda Gragossian.

YM: What’s the secret behind the title, North North South?

AG: The series underwent several working titles over the years, but one day, while driving home from work, I noticed a toppled freeway sign. Its unusual orientation caught my eye, and when I read it aloud differently, the phrase “North North South” immediately resonated as a title. A picture of the sign appears in the book. It encapsulates many of the ideas running through the work. Freeways were built to connect neighborhoods, yet, in practice, they often deepen inequality, creating barriers as much as links by cutting through communities. You can traverse the city on a freeway without ever engaging with the life that unfolds adjacent to it. The title suggests a sense of disorientation, of moving through spaces that are alien and familiar. The repetition of words in the title allows for ambiguity, reflecting the infrastructure of Los Angeles and the psychological experience of navigating it. In a way, it asks the viewers to consider the city not as a comprehensible whole, but as a contingent urban landscape that requires attention and curiosity.

Image courtesy of Ayda Gragossian.

YM: On your website, you describe how slowness became one of your tools. Did you walk to capture your images?

AG: Yes. I often walked in my own neighborhood, but I also drove to other areas to explore them on foot. Walking was central to cultivating a slower, more engaged rhythm. It helped me inhabit the city more fully and notice things that I would otherwise blur past. I don’t take a huge number of photographs, which means I tend to linger before I make an exposure. That kind of attention lets details surface gradually. Time feels suspended when I’m in that heightened state of awareness where the pace of perception changes. In that sense, slowness is both method and mindset.

YM: In French, we have this phrase “ne pas perdre le nord,” which has multiple meanings. One of them roughly translates to “keep moving even if the going gets rough.” That repetition, “North North South,” conjures up similar metaphors in my mind.

AG: It’s about following your own north even when things don’t align neatly. The repetition of the word is like a small disruption, mirroring the way the city can often feel hard to pin down.

The work itself is composed of fragments that resist easy categorization. Just because something doesn’t immediately fit a convention doesn’t mean it should be ignored. That insistence to notice despite disorientation is central to the project, a notion that also carries a gendered dimension. Cities like Los Angeles were designed mainly without women in mind. Its infrastructure prioritizes patterns of movement and other attitudes that evidence a gender bias, leaving pedestrians, especially women, more vulnerable. Navigating the city as a woman requires vigilance. It makes the act of walking a deliberate assertion of presence in spaces that may not have been designed for you. In this sense, the title becomes a prompt to keep moving and observing.

Image courtesy of Ayda Gragossian.

YM: There is a jarring stillness in your pictures. Yet, I can hear the loud L.A. motion beating down on every subject you photographed. How did you find that balance?

AG: That’s an interesting observation. I wonder if someone less familiar with Los Angeles would experience the same tension. I think that for those of us who live here, the hustle and bustle are so deeply ingrained in our daily lives that they become ambient noise. We have learned to block it out, even if we know that we live in barely controlled chaos. The stillness in the images is partly a product of composition, involving the isolation of subjects and the framing of spaces where movement is implied. By eliminating crowds and other obvious markers of activity, I aimed to allow the viewer to experience the city’s rhythms in a different way. I was interested in depicting both what the city projects and what it hides.

YM: We both have photographed LA passionately, while not being from here. We’re new to L.A. However, that distance, for me, acts as a magnifying glass. Over the years, I have had a penchant for photographing motifs that most of my LA friends filter out. How do you think not being from here serves us in getting to the spirit of a new place?

AG: Absolutely. Having lived in Los Angeles for many years, I can view the city with both familiarity and detachment. Being from elsewhere functions like a magnifying glass, amplifying the subtle and the peculiar. Los Angeles is vast, and I’m not sure it will ever become truly familiar. Even when motifs are considered mundane or unremarkable, I find myself pausing to examine them. Having lived in different countries and cities, I find that sense of dislocation heightens my attention to contradictions and particularities that reveal so much about how life unfolds here. There’s also a danger in ignoring the realities of the public space. When certain sights—such as a car stuffed with belongings—become routine, we risk overlooking their social significance. That should never become normal anywhere, let alone in California, the wealthiest state in the country.

©Ayda Gragossian’s North North South, published by GOST, 2025.

YM: Tell us more about your decision to photograph the electric L.A. landscape in black-and-white.

AG: Photographing in black-and-white is closely tied to that sense of stillness we mentioned earlier. Los Angeles is anything but homogeneous; a city of contrasts made up of shifting colors, materials, and surfaces. Stripping the city of its color removes a layer of distraction, allowing the eye and the mind to focus on the structure and texture of the urban landscape. In terms of color, the series might be read as a commentary on spectacle. Black-and-white abstracts the city just enough to turn it mysterious.

YM: What does photographing in a warming world mean to you?

AG: For me, it connects directly to the experience of walking. The endless stream of single-passenger vehicles, the heat radiating from asphalt, and the absence of trees that provide shade for pedestrians coalesce into a harsh reminder of environmental precarity. It’s unsettling how these shortcomings have become normalized. Sitting alone in traffic for hours feels to some like the only accepted way of moving through a city. Those attitudes make it difficult to feel hopeful about change. Photographing in this context is less about directly illustrating climate change and more about inhabiting its effects, describing how the pedestrian’s experience can shape a different perception of a complex and often misunderstood cosmopolitan city.

About the artist: Ayda Gragossian is an Iranian visual artist based in Los Angeles. She holds a BA in Photography and Painting from California State University, Northridge, and an MFA from the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. Her work explores the concepts of displacement, impermanence, longing, and nostalgia, both individually and collectively. However, the longing and nostalgia not only acknowledge places destroyed and times gone, but also they seek an alternate place and emphasize a future yet to come. Her work has been exhibited internationally and has been featured in online platforms such as fotofilmic, Nowhere Diary, All Cities are Beautiful, and Another Place.

Website: https://aydagragossian.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ayda_gragossian/