Out the Window Lax

by Pico Iyer

Contemporary artist Zoe Crosher takes the viewer on an exploratory journey inside the impersonal and transient travel world surrounding the mega international airport, LAX. She finds a landscape packed with identical hotel chains pushed up against giant billboards, where the words hotel and taxi are understood by nearly everyone. Crosher methodically settled into a different hotel room each day and photographed out the window. The only requirement was that the view from each room must duplicate the one she inhabited before. The pattern of the drapes change, the color of the stucco exterior changes and the airplanes caught in mid flight move through the atmosphere, but the basic view stays the same. There is a haunting familiarity that one has never really left the first room, a feeling of complete déjà-vu. Time and identity almost cease to exist. For Crosher, her very quiet, minimal images create huge questions about place, identity, the homogenization of global cultures.

80 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2007

About the author

Pico Iyer is a British-born essayist and novelist of Indian descent. As an acclaimed travel writer, he began his career documenting a neglected aspect of travel -- the sometimes surreal disconnect between local tradition and imported global pop culture. Since then, he has written ten books, exploring also the cultural consequences of isolation, whether writing about the exiled spiritual leaders of Tibet or the embargoed society of Cuba.

Iyer’s latest focus is on yet another overlooked aspect of travel: how can it help us regain our sense of stillness and focus in a world where our devices and digital networks increasing distract us? As he says: "Almost everybody I know has this sense of overdosing on information and getting dizzy living at post-human speeds. Nearly everybody I know does something to try to remove herself to clear her head and to have enough time and space to think. ... All of us instinctively feel that something inside us is crying out for more spaciousness and stillness to offset the exhilarations of this movement and the fun and diversion of the modern world."

Reviews

[Zoe Crosher · Rating 5 out of 5]

of course I have to give it five stars!

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terrific photos by Zoe