Where does society fail?
On Skid Row, a district in Downtown Los Angeles, it fails sitting on the sidewalks, home to one of the largest homeless communities in the United States.
Photographer Federico Hurth shoots between November and December 2022 a series titled “I HATE LA,” words that seem to come straight out of the lips of the characters portrayed, mans and women who are still alive but no longer have a breath of life. Federico Hurth’s Los Angeles is not the city of movies and beaches populated by young skaters, but a failed and never repaired deal with the city, in which there are no sunsets but only nostalgia and emptiness.
The project focuses on capturing the daily struggles of the people who live on Skid Row, emphasizing the systemic failures that have contributed to the neighborhood’s current state. Hurth shows how drugs and poverty have broken the lives of residents, aiming to make people think about the problems faced by residents.
The documentary approach and 35mm film tell of a world whose failures are not romanticized, the dirt and burnt tinfoil are not a concept but stories of souls – as Allen Ginsberg described them in another era – “destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.”
God Bless America
