Riviera: Photographs of Palm Springs (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781943679119)

Photography. Art. RIVIERA documents the eerie fragments of existence left behind in one city. John Brian King photographed RIVIERA from 2016 to 2018 in Palm Springs, California, and its surroundings; a full-time resident at the time, he used a cheap instant film camera to give his photographs a unique, washed-out, hazy aesthetic. King depicts a city that is frozen in a visually arresting state of decline, cataloguing the totems of an absurd civilization. I wanted to photograph the Palm Springs that I lived in and interacted with every single day, King writes, the beautiful, the mundane, the ugly, the hot desolate nature of Coachella Valley. I wasn't interested in the tourism-board view of Palm Springs, of martinis by the swimming pool and candy-colored, Instagram-ready desert art installations. I was interested in the debris--architectural and natural--left behind by generations of people who lived in or visited Palm Springs to escape, to exist, to die.