Behind Melrose Avenue, 2004

About the Photographer

Panar, Ed

American, b. 1976

The small-sized photographs in Ed Panar’s Golden Palms series, taken on the streets of Los Angeles, comprise an idiosyncratic and intimately scaled view of an immense and potentially impersonal city. In careful composed but seemingly casual images, Panar calls attention to unusual visual arrangments in ordinary settings and he captures fleeting events that suggest a more anomalous world exists beneath the veneer of the normal. A tree root in front of the Redondo Beach post office resembles a wizened hand reaching over the curb. The angles of a dumpster echo the geometry of the building behind it, while its bright color stands out in dramatic contrast. "From very early on," Panar states, "Los Angeles has existed as a fabricated image which has shaped the idea we have of the actual geographic location to this day. This is a place where the absurd becomes the everyday and there is a very tangible sense of fiction intermingling with reality all around you." Ed Panar was born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania in 1976. He holds a BA from Indiana University of Pennsylvania (1998) and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan (2005).