The Green in the Hills Above Los Angeles

Los Angeles has a morning light I’ve never stopped thinking about—pale gold, somehow both hazy and precise, the kind that catches the edges of the hills while the rest of the city is still asleep. You see it in early Chinatown, on the cover of some forgotten Tom Petty record, in any photograph taken on the west side before ten in the morning.

Photographer Larsen Sotelo shot model Jessica Morrow somewhere up in those hills for the creative platform 1-900, and the result does what the best LA photography does: it finds the green. Everyone thinks of the city as concrete and brown and smog, and then you go up into Griffith Park or Laurel Canyon or somewhere off Mulholland and there’s this dense, almost subtropical vegetation pressing against the chaparral—cacti growing alongside ferns, everything slightly unreal in the diffuse western light.

Morrow has the kind of ease in front of the camera that looks like she just wandered into frame. That ease is the whole product—not just the aesthetic of the shoot but the idea of LA as a place you can move through at your own rhythm, find your own corners of, treat a sprawling megalopolis like a personal backyard.

I’ve had that feeling once or twice in LA: the sense that the city would accommodate whatever you wanted to do in it, that there was always another hill to climb or another stretch of coast to reach. It doesn’t last. But in a photograph, it holds.