An intimate portrait of East LA, the ‘Eastside of all Eastsides’

For the previous eight years, Belgian photographer Stig De Block has been documenting Los Angeles, drawn to town’s ever-evolving subcultures and close-knit communities. His first e-book, Back to Back, introduced collectively 4 years of intimate portraits from LA’s lowrider scene. Now he returns along with his second monograph, East Los, which focuses on the friendships, rituals and on a regular basis lives of younger folks in East LA.

Here lies the LA River, the bodily and cultural line separating Downtown Los Angeles from Boyle Heights – a neighbourhood that has usually been decreased to stereotypes of crime and deprivation. “East LA has often been photographed sensationally, and I wasn’t interested in confirming those expectations,” the photographer tells Dazed.

When he began the mission 4 years in the past, De Block admits he was initially drawn to a few of East LA’s extra acquainted visible tropes: cityscapes in opposition to dramatic sunsets; roosters working by way of the streets; utility poles plastered with printed bulletins. But midway by way of the mission, his strategy shifted after he encountered the work of former Los Angeles Poet Laureate Luis J. Rodriguez. “I was captivated by his presence, his aura,” he says. “He describes the LA reality in a cinematic way, with vivid descriptions of gestures, locations, atmosphere. From then on, I learned to look for the quiet details in the lives of the communities there.”

De Block was particularly drawn to Rodriguez’s writing about Los Angeles, together with the poem The Eastside of All Eastsides, which evokes the historical past and texture of East LA, the endurance of Mexican-American tradition and the layers of posters and paint that accumulate throughout the neighbourhood like a “real-life collage”. Near its conclusion, Rodriguez acknowledges the world’s hardships whereas insisting on the vitality that persists inside it: “life that sings us all to power”.

Inspired by Rodriguez’s extra nuanced and compassionate imaginative and prescient, De Block’s subsequent pictures got here to mirror his personal interpretation of the poet’s work as he photographed throughout Montebello, Happy Valley, Boyle Heights, Maravilla, Belvedere Gardens and Ramona Gardens. Even when hardship enters the body, he focuses on quieter, extra tender particulars – like a younger man commemorating his deceased brother by carrying a shirt bearing his portrait and the phrases “In Loving Memory”.

In one picture, the photographer interprets Rodriguez’s concept of “rooted cultures” fairly actually, capturing a tree with overlapping trunks subsequent to a picture of three girls’s arms and arms intertwined. “It’s a juxtaposition, a reference to family trees and deeply rooted heritage in the community. The position of these three friends gestures in the same direction as the tree trunks,” says De Block.

He additionally photographed a younger lady leaning on her entrance porch in a blue Dodgers shirt, framed in opposition to a wall the place an ageing Dodgers brand peels from the plaster, whereas an aged man friends out from the shadows. For De Block, the picture speaks to the generations who’ve formed Eastside LA and proceed to dwell there. “With East Los, I wasn’t looking for extraordinary moments, but for stories that quietly showed the overshadowed details we miss in everyday Eastside LA,” he says. 

Stig De Block’s East Los launches on November twelfth, 2026, adopted by a solo exhibition at Gallery FIFTY ONE