So Close Right Now

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Pau, 2020. Large-format portrait of Pau Pescador.

This project began in the desperate, early days of Los Angeles’ first lockdown order, more as a lifeline than anything else. Unemployed and unmoored, like so many others that March, I’d driven across town to visit with a friend—them on their second-story balcony and me in my car, chatting on our phones from across the expanse. It felt miraculous. We talked for close to an hour. Waving goodbye, I took a crooked picture of them through my window.

I filled the next few weeks in this way, frantically crossing and re-crossing Los Angeles multiple times a day, photographing both intimate friends and artists I had to work up the courage to contact. The visits were nourishing. It felt necessary to share space with those I missed while meeting others for the first time; given the generosity and enthusiasm with which people so often responded to my proposal to photograph them, I like to think that the visits comforted them, too. The city became smaller, distances folding in the absence of traffic. But it became bigger, too: communities expanded and reshaped to meet the human needs that were failed by our existing institutions.

In hindsight, it feels natural that my work on this project slowly tapered off when the uprisings began that summer. The project had anchored me in a bewildering geography that pushed and pulled me from the people who make up my community. As I reevaluated my position within this social geography, my own stakes and responsibility in a politic of liberation, the ground came to seem less treacherous, the people less remote. I stopped taking the portraits—I stopped needing to.

A year later, in a Los Angeles that looks much like it did last March, I’m tempted to call the publication of these images a bookend. I’ve sometimes imagined the last photo in this series: a portrait of my partner Jinha and our dog Beans in the passenger seat they often occupied during those distanced visits. I haven’t taken it yet because it feels strange to do it now, so removed from the conditions that motivated the first portraits. It feels stranger still to pretend I could conclude this project while the pandemic is so far from over. Better to call So Close Right Now a bookmark—a reminder of what I owe each person who sat for these photos, proof of those tethers that keep us together.

—Ian Byers-Gamber (as told to A. Jinha Song)

This essay was originally published in Carla issue 27

Rafa, 2020. Large-format portrait of rafa esparza.

Paul, 2020. Large-format portrait of Paul Mpagi Sepuya.

Patrick, 2020. Large-format portrait of Patrick Staff.

Max, Walter, and Julian, 2020. Large-format portrait of Maxwell and Julian Stein.

Alison, 2020. Medium-format portrait of Alison Saar.

Ian Byers-Gamber is a Los Angeles-based artist and art documentarian. In both capacities, his work often involves producing visual archives for and around arts spaces. His photographs propose alternate ways of looking at existing archives, while imagining new ones altogether. 

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