Photo Project: Megan Baaske

From New York City to San Francisco, cities throughout the United States and the world boast efficient and popular modes of public transportation. Los Angeles is the second largest city in country, and one of the most dispersed geographically, but cannot claim a thriving system of public transit. Despite the presence of buses and even the Metro, most residents of the City of Angels rely on their cars.
The result, of course, is the ever-worsening traffic nightmare. Backed-up freeways are an ever-present problem, and it is not unusual to find congestion at any hour of the day. Commuters may spend as much as two hours driving to and from their work or school. The amount of time and energy devoted to navigating Los Angeles is astounding.
This photography project, then, is about the transportation of Los Angeles. The focus of the work will be on private transportation, since the majority of residents rely on their personal cars to get around. Transportation is well worthy of such study. As any city, but particularly one as large and dispersed as Los Angeles, develops, solutions for transportation assume increasing urgency. Admittedly, the topic is more challenging than documenting the more graphic societal ills of the city. Whether it is homelessness or gang violence, it is much easier to represent those dilemmas through visuals than the abstract, and admittedly dry subject of transportation. Yet what it lacks in severity, the transportation problem makes up for in universality. Everyone in Los Angeles can relate to the frustrations of traveling the cityscape. Finally, I propose this topic because it is a societal problem with which I intimately familiar. I have little knowledge of the homelessness that plagues my city. My attempts to catalogue these ills would unavoidably be from an outsider’s perspective. With transportation, however, my work might be more authentic and sincere, since I regularly grapple with the aggravations of traffic.
My goal is to create a body of work that will compel viewers to look at something as ordinary and commonplace as transportation from a different perspective. I want to force viewers to really think about what it means to travel around Los Angeles, and the realities of spending so much time in transit. My hope is to bring attention to the issue of transportation as a sight of social change.

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