Wells Fargo Towers Blue Sky Countdown Timer

This is the Los Angeles that does not make the movies. No neon, no sunset, no convertible. Just a Tuesday, half past twelve, and four towers standing in a row with their names in letters big enough to read from the freeway. I stood across the street with my back against a low wall and shot upwards, which is the only way to make this city look vertical. At ground level it is all palm trunks and car parks. Tilt the lens and suddenly it is Manhattan with better weather. The palms help. They always help. Those four on the right are so evenly spaced you would swear somebody planted them for the photograph, and somebody probably did, in 1960, when this whole district was still being invented on paper. The clouds were moving fast that afternoon, cumulus stacking up behind the towers like smoke from something just out of frame. I ate a sandwich on that wall and watched a man in a suit argue with a parking meter. Then the light went flat, the way it does here, and I put the camera away and went back to the car.