Artist Humanizes Google Street Views of Southeast L.A.
Artist and educator Felix Quintana acts like a curator as much as a photographer, carefully selecting images of the Southeast L.A. neighborhoods he grew up in and around by scanning the photographic footage captured by Google Maps Street View. In his current exhibition, "Cruising Below Sunset" at Residency Art Gallery, Quintana chooses past moments, captured incidentally, to highlight people that were originally rendered insignificant. These repurposed images, printed in cyanotype blue, make up the ongoing series, "Los Angeles Blueprints" (2019-present), which is featured in the exhibition alongside "Para Los Little Homies" (2019-present), a series of mixed media collages and one sculptural, three-dimensional collage that hangs by zip ties from the gallery ceiling.
Though the faces of the figures that appear in the series of photographs are blurred by Google's navigation tool, Quintana restores attention to their humanity and purpose to their movements with his descriptive, storytelling titles, like "Posted on the beach cruiser by the old Compton Fashion Center" (2022). He adorns the snapshot of what might otherwise be an ordinary scene of someone mid-movement — walking, driving, biking, working — by marking playful white, faint scratches into the prints, like traces of writing on a chalkboard. "The Google Street View comes around and takes images in a very apathetic way," Quintana shared in an interview with KCET. "I wanted to shift that."
"What would it mean for someone being from a place like L.A., being born and raised here, to find images and ways to kind of elevate people?Felix Quintana, artist
Initially, he was inspired to make these "ready-made images" after being introduced in college to the work of Doug Rickard, a white artist from San Jose who used the technology tool in 2009 to digitally visit and capture images of cities where "unemployment is high and educational opportunities are few." Rickard documented mainly Black and Brown people in cities like Detroit, New Orleans, and Fresno, without ever leaving his home. "I thought it was really interesting, conceptually, but I also felt like the work was kind of problematic," Quintana reflected. "I felt like, damn, what would it mean for someone being from a place like L.A., being born and raised here, to find images and ways to kind of elevate people? Because the people being documented with this kind of objective documentation, are mostly likely working-class folks on their way to work, taking the bus, walking on the street."
While browsing Google Street View in 2014, he came across his dad, stopped in his truck at the end of the block Quintana grew up on. "If you zoom in you can see him with his curly hair and his sunglasses, so I kind of sat on that image for a bit." That image became "El jefe making a left off Soul Street onto long beach boulevard (under a g)" (2022) an homage to his dad, who passed away in 2017. It also became a strong reminder and motivation for Quintana for making his work. The people he finds in the Google Street View images might be irrelevant to the tech company, but to Quintana they are not anonymous — "I may not know them, but I feel a certain connection."
Born in 1991 in Lynwood, California, to parents who settled in Southeast Los Angeles after fleeing the civil war in El Salvador, Quintana knew he wanted to be an artist ever since his kindergarten teacher gave him the word for it. Inspired by cartoons, graffiti, music (like hip hop, rock, jazz, and cumbia), streetwear brands, poetry and his older cousins, he grew up exploring many creative forms of expression before landing on photography. In high school, he began taking photos while riding the bus around L.A., kept a blog, and even had a side gig as an event photographer, documenting backyard parties. Disappointed that their photography class focused on Photoshop and digital cameras, he and his friends cleaned up their school's shuttered dark room so that their teacher would train them in using and developing film.
To produce many of the images in the exhibition, Quintana applied one of the oldest photographic printing processes — the cyanotype print, in which the resulting blue color gives the method its name. (All of the works in "Cruising Below Sunset" are overwhelmingly tinted blue.) He was first introduced to cyanotypes while studying photography as an undergraduate at Cal Poly Humboldt, but only began using the method in workshops with his students while working as a teaching artist in L.A. after he graduated. At that time, in his personal practice, he worked mostly digitally, creating gestural, painterly artworks by layering photographs of light in Adobe Photoshop. He started integrating cyanotypes into his own work while pursuing his MFA at San Jose State University. He craved something more hands-on and the analog process forced him to slow down. Cyanotypes gave Quintana the ability to match the pace of his practice with the intentionality and care that he gives his subject matter — his hometown and the working-class people that move, work and live within it.
Some of the photographs from the "Los Angeles Blueprints" series are reprinted and layered in the collages among family photos, found clothing, spray paint, cardboard, coffee filters and swap meet tickets. The figures who might have been walking home or to work are now cut out of their original backgrounds and placed around cyanotype prints and digital negatives of recognizable signage like the 99 Cent Only store, Tam's and Felix the Cat, street corners and bridges; L.A. hats, CDs, and Quintana's own street photography, creating entirely new landscapes that still manage to feel familiar. Much like he imagines the depth behind the blurred faces captured on Google Street View, Quintana highlights the grocery store parking lots and local business signs as if they are small monuments in their own right, transforming trips for everyday errands into tributes.
The torn edges of paper and drip marks from paint reveal the artist's quick and intuitive movements, while other aspects of the work reveal deliberate and careful attention, like the laborious process of collaging and printing cyanotype images by hand — their blemishes, imperfect exposure, and monochrome reproduction mixing past and present, almost suspending the viewer in time. In "Cruising Below Sunset," Quintana replicates the unhurried pace referenced in the show's title through both his process and subject matter, setting a tempo for the viewer to follow. He highlights people captured mid-movement and slowed to a pause, caught by chance by cameras on a moving car. Quintana considers cruising as "defiance of movement" — a resolution to stay in place. Inverting images that were originally taken in the form of surveillance, he manages to build a sort of archive of collective memory — documenting and honoring the tone and language of a Black and Brown, working-class Los Angeles in the midst of change.
