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Introduction

I have a very 'student' approach to hybrid photography, which is great, because that's the kind of low-frills lifestyle I like to live. Most of the pictures here were taken on 35mm film with a Nikon F3, then scanned in (sometimes through negative/ film scanners, but mostly with flatbed scanners). I'm never content with what anyone else can produce. This is why my images are completely reworked and digitally manipulated. The purists and photography websites hate people like me because we do not present our work in it's natural form.

I see this as a particularly sad approach to photography, and art on the whole. The moment you press the shutter-release, whether it's digital or film you're working with, your imagination is attempting its best to conspire with your senses to capture that moment. That moment onwards, you begin to lose whatever it was within your soul that pushed you to take that picture. I refuse to sit back and compromise on the strength of the emotion I feel whenever I take a picture. This is why I take to the computer, and warp the picture into something else, even if it doesn't take me back to the exact same emotion my subconcious self was in when the shutter was triggered. The important thing is to bring back the strength of emotion that I felt, looking through the viewfinder.

A lot of my newer work is very collage-oriented. I guess this is what people call an artist's 'style'. I'm no artist. I'm just a regular guy, who likes taking pictures of predominantly urban landscapes, because they reflect imperfection. The collage approach I believe, represents me at my current point in life: an amalgamation of a whole lot of things, and not particularly smoothly melded together.

The case for Los Angeles (made because most of the photographs here are of Los Angeles. As they change/ update with time, so will the message here.)

Why do I prefer the urban landscape?

Coming to America, I quickly became disappointed with suburbia (no offense to those of you from the 'burbs or even worse...Orange County!) and how it tries so hard to be uniform. Smooth asphalt. Solid yellow lane markings. Perfect brick structure on the malls. Meticulously maintained grass rolled out in mats for conception. Perfectly figured women, perfectly accessorized, with little room for error or deviation from the norm. 7 bedroom houses, with 5 car garages, and three people in the house. It's only natural that coming from a bustling city like Lahore, Pakistan, that I am in my element only in a bigger city, just like Los Angeles.

As a graduate student in engineering, I really shouldn't have found the time I did for exploring L.A. the way I did. I decided after the first year of study that the restlessness I felt going to class wasn't my eagerness to start working, but the fact that I was in a great metropolis (which made it all the more fun to listen to Jason Bentley's radio show bearing the same name on KCRW!). I think I fell in love with L.A. because of all the shit people give it, and decided that sacrificing time in the engineering library buried in integrals, attempting to find the optimum receiver solution in colored noise, and other such problems, for exploring the city would be a worthy investment. OK, so it wasn't that clear. I was just sick of homework by my last semester there. People taunted my choices and desire to get to know this city better.

"It's so gaudy..."

"It's just full of Hollywood wannabes, new money and fake tits..."

"L.A.? You mean Tehrangeles?"

And so the rants went. And I think I naturally take the side of the underdog. Despite the glamor that Hollywood and Orange County (which I must remind you, is really not Los Angeles...) hold for the rest of the world, L.A. is indeed an imperfect city. Take a walk through downtown and you'll find yourself wondering "Does L.A. really have a downtown?"

What's funny is that it has a real downtown, because this is what city center is meant to be. A city's center, by urban standards, should be the window to the city's soul. Sure, downtown L.A. lacks the glossy skyscraper look of Chicago's Loop, Toronto's spic and span streets or even New York's "3 am is just as busy as 9 am" look and feel.

Certain things set L.A. apart by such wide standards that only those who've lived and breathed it can really understand my adoration for El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Poriuncula (its original name). Things that are completely random, that only a city as horizontally vast as it could hold.

Random things entice me back to L.A. Things like the South Central Farm, which is perhaps a 10 minute drive east from downtown. I might be wrong. All I remember is that I got a lousy 400 dollar ticket there for not coming to a complete stop at the red light before making a right. This, in South Central Los Angeles. I'm pretty sure the LAPD had better things to be attending to.

Another thing I could never get over was the fact that USC, this preppy and somewhat prestigious university with I'd say some really world-class faculty, was spot in South Central L.A.

Going a few blocks up and down completely changed the dynamic. Kids walked around campus in their perfectly-planned-but-utterly-distressed Los Angeles designer couture, drove around in Range Rovers and the Greek parties put those at the Standard to shame at times. Yet, walk a few minutes off campus in the wrong direction and you'll find yourself cursing yourself for not having more than 10 bucks in cash, because you're about to get mugged, and they don't take plastic.

Going to USC, I guess I was never too far from where real hip-hop and 'gangsta' rap got a start. Power106; a radio Tupac would toast in the tracks I listened to as a wannabe gangsta' in high school pervaded the airwaves around me. The Crystal Method played a weekly radio show, mixing up rabid SoCal electronic beats with Vegas hometown flair. John Digweed spit out his tracks over a weekly show.

I guess the things that draw me to L.A. are not the same things that draw you to a city.

But I started all this as an introduction to my photography. The photos are collages and are pretty random. I guess I try to capture the imperfections as well as all the raw energy that L.A. throbs with. I headed to L.A. for a graduate degree in electrical engineering. What I left with, was a lifetime of memories. Stay strong, Los Angeles.

Turn the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.-Frank Lloyd Wright