Karsu Nalbantoglu’s Fifteen-Mile Walk from Downtown LA to Santa Monica

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With her phone down to one percent and rush hour closing in, photographer Karsu Nalbantoglu picked Pico Boulevard for a walk to Santa Monica, mostly because the name shared a first letter with “Portraits.” Fifteen miles became five days, and a fifteen-mile “hike” became a portrait of the city itself.

By Jonas Cuénin. Photos by Karsu Nalbantoglu.

Karsu Nalbantoglu set out on a morning thick with canyon-fire smoke, a medium format camera in hand and no plan beyond the alliteration of the street’s name. Pico Boulevard, one of the oldest routes in Los Angeles, is named for Pío Pico, the last Mexican governor of Alta California; it once linked downtown to the western farms and, eventually, the coast. Jewish, Japanese, Mexican, Korean, Ethiopian: block by block, it gathers nearly every community the city is made of, a route most Angelenos, Nalbantoglu included, had never fully walked.

Three miles in, her phone dead, she sprinted across a crosswalk-less street and landed inside Martha’s Thrift Shop. Janet, who ran the store with her family, handed over her charger without hesitation and talked about the coming renovation and her son’s dreams while it powered back up. Her father, Gustavo, was the man Nalbantoglu had spotted from outside. Before she left, Janet pressed a white crochet blouse into her hands. “It’s a gift,” she said. Nalbantoglu still wears it.

By the fifth portrait, the walk had stopped being about reaching Santa Monica. Nalbantoglu began sitting with the people she met, unhurried, and the fifteen miles stretched into five days, not for the distance but for the conversations. Nick Metropolis, a longtime vintage collector who had just relocated his shop, kept a stack of two-dollar bills close at hand, each marked with a handwritten note, and handed them out whether a purchase was made or not. The two talked for two hours, about faith, kismet, and his worries for the country. His shop has since closed.

At Jook Records, blues filled the room and three men shouted over a poker game, records stacked around them like a personal archive. Abraham, the owner, spoke to her about music and about the neighborhood, how his shop had come to embody the era it had lived through. That shop, too, has since closed. Along the fifteen miles, Nalbantoglu bought a fish, walked a mile in the rain, was chased by a police officer, invited to a drag race and to a bowl of soup, and ate what she counts among the best pastrami sandwiches in Los Angeles.

The rest of the walk gathered its own cast: Irene, a tailor who handed her a Gatorade without a word of shared language; Maggie Kim, selling betta fish at Fumi’s Tropical Fish while telling her about immigrating to give her daughter a better life; Alan, a young mechanic walking her through the vintage cars in his showroom; a man on the sidewalk who, offered a few dollars, smiled and declined, saying he had what he needed. Steve, at Fatty Boy Stereos, invited her to a lowrider meet she never made it to but still means to attend.

Pico Boulevard, Nalbantoglu concludes, is less a street than a living archive, a map of migration and memory built from people setting pieces of their world side by side. JT was her final portrait, taken where the boulevard meets Ocean Avenue and the walk comes to its end. Without quite intending to, she had spent five days documenting something that, she says, will not exist again in the same way.