Damaged by Paul Grund

Signed copies

In Damaged, Paul Grund turns his lens toward Los Angeles — not as the dream factory or cinematic backdrop, but as a city already undone. Echoing photographer Lewis Baltz’s bleak observation that Los Angeles “has already been destroyed, and then left around as a warning,” the work resists the polished mythology that usually defines it. Grund’s camera roams through a fractured landscape of walls, overpasses, and indifferent geometry, exposing a city built from disconnection.

Shot almost entirely from the inside of a moving car, the photographs are born from motion and limitation. There is no time to compose or to wait; images are caught on instinct, like the quick calculations of a skater reading the urban surface. The result is a sequence of moments that blur between recognition and accident — a rhythm of seeing that mirrors the way we move through cities we do not fully belong to.

Grund’s Los Angeles is not one of spectacle or ruin, but of exhaustion. The city appears as a collection of self-contained zones — sun-bleached façades, tangled wires, fences, and concrete boundaries that seem to both protect and exclude. Faces rarely meet the camera; when they do, they carry the fatigue of those who remain unseen in a city designed to be watched.

The book unfolds without clear beginning or end. Each photograph feels like a fragment caught in passing, a drive-by record of a place that refuses coherence. Together, they trace a quiet cartography of absence — a city defined not by its landmarks but by what slips between them.

Damaged offers no single narrative or conclusion. It is a meditation on the built landscape as it is lived and passed through: a Los Angeles of residue and reflection, where beauty and desolation coexist in the same fading light.