A Shady Divide: Remade (2023)
Wherever you look, wealth and income gaps exist both within and outside of our vision. Whether it’s cars, houses, stores, or even by how clean an area is, people are able to sense the level of affluence that a neighborhood might represent. With Los Angeles being one of the most urban cities in the United States, the wealth gap that follows the city is immense. Trees give us comfort, cleaner air, and are used for aesthetic purposes. However, greenery universally requires great funding to both plant and maintain them, which alludes to why they are more common in wealthier neighborhoods. Inspired by the National Geographic article A Shady Divide, in my piece I attempt to represent this wealth gap in Los Angeles’ neighborhoods through trees and the shade that is provided by them by using a digital source accessible to many young adults our age - Google Maps. I chose to use Google Maps as to photographing locations around the city as I wanted to emphasize our generation’s engulfment in the digital world. While screenshotting neighborhoods from my computer, I realized how much of the outdoors I had never seen before. Through my piece, I hope to communicate the tree inequity sight that many of us might’ve swept across unwittingly.
