Los Angeles is a constantly shifting, fragmented city with a landscape that is both navigated and determined by the car. To create the photographs in North North South, the Iranian American artist Ayda Gragossian wandered through different areas of the city, documenting the spaces, objects and textures that are often overlooked when life is in constant motion. Over a period of four years she amassed a collection of images of store windows, parking lots and suburban houses that function as motifs. Her black and white photographs are devoid of people, an aesthetic choice that emphasises the socioeconomic marginalisation she encountered on a daily basis. Los Angeles comprises eighty-eight incorporated cities with severe socioeconomic disparities, a fact that gets lost in the glamour generated by the film and music industries. The book takes its title from a photograph of a broken freeway sign, collating the main ideas behind the series: the quintessential American condition of traversing freeways that perpetuate inequality, and the power of photography to transform the banality of everyday life into the poetic.