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In 2012, L.A.-based Dublin-born photographer Andrew Ward began using his phone's camera to snap pictures of sofas he'd find abandoned on the street.
"We all have this phone in our pocket with a camera," Ward told LAist. "And photography is replacing language as the primary means of communication. So, I wanted to focus on still images with a certain aesthetic."
In the years since he began "The Sofas of L.A." collection, Ward has posted some several hundred sofa pictures to his Instagram and Tumblr pages.
As Ward writes in his essay on the series, the sofas represent something deeper about L.A.
It seems as if the ground pushes up a fresh crop of them daily. They usually appear overnight and then sit, withering and wilting in the L.A. sunshine until they are eventually collected by the sanitation department. What was once the centerpiece of someone’s home sits abandoned on a city sidewalk. They have become part of the fabric of L.A., reflecting on one hand the transient nature of the inhabitants of this city and secondly as a sign of the disposable nature of our consumer driven world.
What has become apparent about photographing this cast off furniture is how some of the pieces blend in with their new unintended environments. Some of the sofas look more at home and fit their new location better than they would have ever looked in somebody’s living room.
This project represents an alternate view of Los Angeles and attempts to identify a different element of the many fragments that go into the making of this complex Metropolis.
The photographs were exhibited in February at the Taylor Galleries in Dublin, Ireland, and at the Main Street Gallery during the Capture Photography Festival in Vancouver, Canada in April 2016.
To view more of Andrew Ward's work visit his website.
