The photographs in this ongoing series were taken west of Western Avenue in Los Angeles from 1975–2000. They are part of a visual diary I’ve kept of the neighborhoods where I’ve lived and the streets that I drive. They were not taken for any assignment but as a part of everyday life. I was a student of photographer Emmet Gowin, and when I moved to Los Angeles to make movies, I began to discover the city through my camera. Many of the pictures were taken when I was writing Pee-wee’s Big Adventure with Paul Reubens and the late Phil Hartman, and The Big Picture, which I wrote with Christopher Guest and Michael McKean and also produced. The photographs are inspired in part by the early hand-colored postcards that promoted Los Angeles as an exotic locale and the iconic black and white images that Max Yavno made of Los Angeles in the late 1940s and early 1950s.