Franck Bohbot grew up in France, and when he arrived in Los Angeles in 2018 he found the sprawl hard to navigate. One reference point for him was the city’s video game bars, whose atmosphere he recognised from favourite adolescent films, including Terminator 2 and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Having wandered into his first one, Blipsy’s in Koreatown, he started chasing their escapist gloom. Several of the bars were bathed in light reminiscent of painter Edward Hopper’s lonely Nighthawks. In nearly all cases his camera found images whose timeframe was hard to locate: the arcade bars were rooted in 1980s gaming culture – Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Track & Field were staple machines – but their regulars, as here in Barcade in the northeast suburb of Highland Park, often referenced styles from the 1950s onwards.
The project became a kind of quest: Bohbot went from borough to borough in the city and along the coast, searching out its joystick bars, acting on tipoffs and making lists of leads. It allowed him to draw an alternative map of the city, each location offering a new challenge, like levels of a video game. “Every arcade draws a slightly different crowd,” he noted, “from beachgoers and bar-hoppers to seriously committed gamers. The atmospheres vary, too – some bright, pristine, ordered; some dark, moody, covert.” Several bar owners, passionate about their creations, welcomed him and his camera; other times he had to be more discreet.
The pictures have become a book, which immerses you in all the noir-ish, neon allure of the places Bohbot discovered. If we are tempted to think of California bleached with light, his images dwell in those darkened rooms the natives go to escape it. There is in them much of Joan Didion’s city, that place which “exhilarates some people and floods others with amorphous unease”.
