Rancho Rodeo de la Aguas for "Love of Sun"

Since moving to the city of Los Angeles, my fascination with the paparazzi has led me to pursue an ongoing body of work that investigates themes around celebrity culture and the influences of the movie industry on the city. Utilizing paparazzi and street photography techniques, my practice investigates Hollywood culture on the streets of Los Angeles. For the past few years, I have been trying to understand and uncover the complexity of
Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills through photography and the medium’s unique relationship to Hollywood culture.

Rodeo Drive is a shopping district of designer labels, and haute couture fashion boutiques and shops that stretches three blocks long. It is also a localized yet international symbol of status and success. Rodeo symbolizes a commercial ‘paradise’ build around fame, luxury, wealth, and material culture for the ultra rich and famous.  It also functions as a major tourist destination in Los Angeles.  

Rancho Rodeo de la Aguas (Ranch of the Gathering Waters) is a site-specific photo series that attempts to map the site of Rodeo Drive through a selection of photographs.  This body of work plays with the concept and fluidity of water as a metaphor for the time & space of a body trafficking through the simulacrum of this site. Like the fluidity between production and consumption between China and California, of the luxury goods on sale and show there, bodies move unconsciously as the most abstract waters whose banks are defined by complex international economic relations and consumer desires.

My fascination extends to the implicit dynamics of Rodeo Drive’s international exchange and consumer culture. The import/export of products supports lifestyle and branding that expands international aesthetics to drive local and international traffic on this famous road. This phenomenon is especially poignant today – while many of these products have been produced in China for decades, a Chinese consumer market that can be likened to the Rodeo Drive fascination with luxury is a recent phenomenon.

China clearly has a strong impact on globalization between the United States’ production and distribution of high end products. In major Chinese cities the products and “aura” of Rodeo Drive are emulated by the nouveau riche populating streets like Shanghai’s Nanjing Lu. However, while many of these products are produced in China, they are less costly to the Rodeo Drive consumer than their Chinese counterpart. For example, my photo “Welcome to Rodeo Drive” pushes the idea that Rodeo Drive is, in Los Angeles, a function of Hollywood, whereas for China Rodeo Drive’s function is consumption. Understood this way, the image symbolize these alternate reading per culture.

The transcendental role of luxury and status in both societies is in a sense meant for paparazzi, whether in the traditional sense or in the form of the luxury consumer’s fantasy of self. Hence the popularity of Rodeo Drive for Chinese tourists – the cost of goods is lower than in China, and the aura of the street satisfies a collective fantasy of (Hollywood) celebrity glamour. This series attempts to understand and uncover the complexity of Rodeo Drive’s cultural and economic influences. Lately, its relation to Chinese production and consumption of luxury products is one of many insights that have surfaced from Rodeo Drive’s gathering cultural waters.