From 2021 to 2022, I used geographic data from The California Department of Conservation to track and photograph the Oil Industry across Los Angeles and Southern California. With their Well Finder tool, I visited and photographed Active and Former Oil Wells and Fields throughout the region — as well as areas affected by the Huntington Beach Oil Spill in October 2021, which served as an impetus for this project. With each location I visited, an understanding of the magnitude of the Los Angeles “project” began to form. Here was a city that had, in the span of a century, erased from culture one image of itself in favor of its own Hollywood adaptation – even as its past was just a few meters underfoot.
