Lost Angeles

Dressel is a Hollywood sound editor by profession, having shared in winning Oscars and Golden Reel Awards—an unusual background for a photographer, but he also has a keen eye, as evinced by these black-and-white street photographs taken in 2014–20 Los Angeles. An admirer of humanist photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dressel eschews digital post-processing for an aesthetic that dates to the early 20th century, favoring spontaneous street portraits and the ebb and flow of urban life, a style that demands he be both bold and gregarious. His is a Felliniesque carnival (unhoused people, street performers, gawking tourists), conveying a flawed humanity and a tragic sense of life. The uncaptioned photographs appear to have been made mostly in downtown LA along Hollywood Boulevard and in Venice Beach; viewers must search for meaning in the images themselves, without orienting text. Sometimes the ironic juxtapositions seem too easy (e.g., a down-and-out person sitting next to a bus shelter sign reading “Here’s to Drinking Your Dessert”), but more often the images are unsettling or grotesquely comic, with that odd capacity photography has for telling but not explaining.