Anyone who has spent any amount of time strolling through any urban landscape can tell you of the ubiquity of the American Apparel billboard. The generally small, stark advertisements pop up wherever they can fit in: the sides of bodegas, above apartment buildings, on street corners, and on hillsides. But the over-styled looks of the models and the slick clothes don’t always jive with the neighborhoods in which they are placed.
To highlight this juxtaposition, photographer Thomas Alleman took to the streets of Los Angeles to capture where these billboards actually exist. Looking at the billboards in their “natural environment” seems to highlight a kind of discrepancy that goes beyond just demographics—these seem simply out of place.
Alleman has lived and worked in the Los Angeles area for more than 15 years, earning distinctions as the California Newspaper Photographer of the Year in 1995 and the Los Angeles Newspaper Photographer of the Year in 1996. This is his statement on the work:
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[via LAist]
