Los Angeles is a city of paradoxes. The celluloid dreams and Hollywood glitter butted up against a housing crisis and massive homeless population. The unyielding desert landscape up against heavily watered lawns of Beverly Hills. A city filled with transplants who arrive in search of a place to reinvent themselves and follow their dreams and deeply rooted communities that have been here for generations. There is the quiet of deep snow in the Angeles National Forest and the roaring multi-level traffic flying by sky-high on cloverleaf interchange of the 110 and 105 freeways.

This year’s edition looks at the dichotomies of this city. Dichotomies that range from the mundane and intimate to the epic and iconic. Incongruous at times, the experience of Los Angeles is that of holding many truths simultaneously. The haves and the have-nots, decaying Art Deco theaters and gleaming experimental new architecture, dreams born and dreams dashed, the losses to fires and the rebirth of communities from those ashes.

There is a grit and intensity to this city. It is an unexpected crazy quilt comprised of unique communities, varied architecture, and micro-climates connected by a maze of freeways and surface streets. Nature and the built cityscape, the idealized world of the entertainment industry against real people’s lives, the desert and the ocean: Los Angeles thrives at the intersection unlike things and constant change.