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" Love them or hate them, you can&amp;#039;t deny that American Apparel ads are effective in eliciting a reaction. They&amp;#039;re bold and vaguely pornographic, and the company even prides itself on using its own employees as amateur models. But what if we went beyond looking at the images alone? That&amp;#039;s what photographer Thomas Alleman dove into with his new project, &amp;quot;The American Apparel.&amp;quot; After photographing the streets of Los Angeles for years, Alleman\u2014whose work has appeared in Harper&amp;#039;s, TIME, and U.S. News\u2014was struck one day by the way an AA billboard looked juxtaposed with his urban environs. And so a series began, challenging the ads by placing them in a framework that transforms them to look a bit dystopian, ridiculous\u2014and even a little silly.   Related: Is Gender Segregation at the Oscars Necessary?   While Alleman says that he presents his work for us to create our own commentaries, we were curious to hear his own thoughts. And, as it turns out, he has a lot to say. Read on to see his strong opinions on sexism in modern media, how the landscapes are changing, and why context is everything.   How did inspiration strike for this project? One afternoon in 2011 I drove past an auto repair shop in East Hollywood, and noticed a really striking juxtaposition above their building: four TV satellite dishes were installed in a neat line right next to one of those American Apparel billboards, which showed four women in a similarly neat line, all doing some bizarre, yoga-style stretch, wearing leotards. Like most Los Angelenos, I&amp;#039;d seen those AA billboards a million times, but had never given them a second thought, and certainly hadn&amp;#039;t considered photographing them. One of the conventions that most mature photographers adhere to is that there&amp;#039;s no benefit or wisdom or glory in shooting someone else&amp;#039;s art. However, that confluence of billboard design and real world happenstance seemed too cool to pass up. What kind of messages do you think this juxtaposition of American Apparel&amp;#039;s sexualized ads and the urban environs of L.A. evoke? The commodification of women&amp;#039;s bodies\u2014especially very young women\u2014is one of the Top Five worst and weirdest things about our hard-hearted culture. And American Apparel is clearly a big-ass participant in all that, without doubt. But they didn&amp;#039;t create this state-of-play\u2014there are many other competitors on the field, some even darker. They simply excel at the game, in a very contemporary way that&amp;#039;s relentless and unapologetic and kind of cutting edge, for better or worse.   American Apparel famously claims that when they&amp;#039;re not hiring porn stars for their sessions, they use young women from the company or the neighborhood, and that&amp;#039;s apparent in many of the images. Indeed, many of those amateurs look startlingly plain, almost anti-glam. And their poses are usually pretty awkward, sometimes even bizarre. In other words, those amateurs are allowed to be\u2014or encouraged or directed to be\u2014really, really amateur. And, when an amateur is in front of the camera, the photography itself becomes correspondingly unsophisticated: the light is flat, the backgrounds are simply white, and the pictures are often black and white. It&amp;#039;s as if those pictures of gawky teenagers were made by a cousin or uncle, on the sly, down in the basement with crude equipment. That&amp;#039;s what those pictures look like: while a bad photographer sweats under his dime store lights, young women are aping the sophistication of models they&amp;#039;ve seen in glamour magazines, performing inexpert poses they believe are alluring, throwing caution to the wind and really working it, however goofy the results might be. On a design level, I find that to be ingenious, however disturbing it might also be. The results look anarchic, but I&amp;#039;m willing to bet the post-production process is extremely deliberate and thoughtful. In other words, those images that look like Uncle Julius made them in the basement with an old Instamatic are intended to look like that, because that story will get under our skin, which is where the id lives. Indeed, context is almost entirely what this body of work is about. My first and essential mission, quite simply, is to photograph the context we call Los Angeles.  What is it about the urban environments you chose that works for this project? Many of the neighborhoods in which those billboards reside are decidedly middle-class, and often famously hip, and the people who live there are teachers, lawyers, screenwriters, artists, cops, nurses and politicians. But they live cheek-by-jowl with cashiers, students, bus drivers and home-health workers, and one usually can&amp;#039;t tell the difference between one household and another, at a glance. If L.A. isn&amp;#039;t nearly as racially-integrated as New York\u2014a great failing, despite its reputation as the most diverse city in the country\u2014it is certainly integrated by class. True, neither beauticians nor college professors tend to live in the wealthier climes of Beverly Hills and Hancock Park and Bel Air, but everywhere else they share the same streets, and they all slog down those fucked-up avenues together, in a wide variety of neighborhoods. In the 20s and 30s, when most of east side of the surging metropolis was being built, L.A.&amp;#039;s zoning laws were hijacked by land speculators and developers, and neighborhoods and streets grew without guiding principle, changing and shifting every hundred yards by the exceptions demanded by homeowners, landscapers and building contractors. Now, those streets jut and meander, sidewalks curve around grandma&amp;#039;s favorite old sycamore, and fences and phone poles and high cement walls fly up and out at every unlikely opportunity. And I freaking love it all. You wouldn&amp;#039;t want to be on acid, walking in these neighborhoods: the weirdness would make you mad, I bet. For me, every step is thrilling, here in L.A. So, I love the nuttiness of this built environment, and I&amp;#039;ve been photographing it with great delight for about twelve years. A couple years ago I began working in color and set about searching for my next long-term project. The only obvious condition was, it&amp;#039;d have to involve walking and street life, and the chaos of L.A.&amp;#039;s built environment, which remains my obsession and muse. And so I stumbled into &amp;quot;The American Apparel&amp;quot;.... What kinds of themes or discussions do you tend to provoke with your photography? I&amp;#039;ve already described my abiding interest in the urban landscape of L.A., specifically. Over the last decade, I&amp;#039;ve also spent considerable time in New York, making similar black-and-white images with my screwy plastic cameras, and I&amp;#039;ve produced portfolios of San Francisco, Paris, and Inner Mongolia, using the same techniques. Underlying all that, I suppose, is the fundamental desire to confront, to infiltrate, to interrogate a three-dimensional environment that&amp;#039;s chaotic, full of stuff, and then to corral, with framing and composition, a two-dimensional picture that solves the riddle of that crazy space. And, of course, the more complicated the scene, the greater the challenge, and the sweeter the victory, should one actually achieve that. For me, part of the complication in any space is\u2026the complication of space. Depth and dimension. Layers of information receding away from the camera. In all my work, whether commercial portraits or photojournalism or &amp;quot;The American Apparel,&amp;quot; the essence of my effort is the arrangement of depth and space, of layers of information, one behind the other, or marching left to right, semi-transparent, all dancing democratically in their final, two-dimensional re-presentation. It&amp;#039;s interesting that for this project, you took photographs of other photographs. How does American Apparel&amp;#039;s photography aesthetic work to support the mood of your own images? In the last twenty-plus years, it&amp;#039;s become quite common for photographers to craft three-dimensional situations solely in order to photograph them. It occurred to me, shortly after I began this American Apparel series, that maybe, in a cracked way, that&amp;#039;s what I was doing: in concert with collaborators who were unaware of my efforts\u2014and whose ever-changing contributions I couldn&amp;#039;t control\u2014I was making pictures that documented an ongoing public art project. See more of Thomas Alleman&amp;#039;s work here. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/art-design/news/a12645/thomas-alleman-the-american-apparel/>