Lights of LA: The Importance of Light in the City of Angels

Running head: LIGHTS OF LA
Lights of LA
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1LIGHTS OF LA
Introduction
“Light” is one of the most important source of energy, it gives life and it gives us the
vision of the world we stay in. Light is harmonious, the rhythmic movements of the colors
creates the vision (Blumberg). Light is something that communicates to our mind and
consciousness directly. Both natural and artificial lights have the most important role in our
lives. The primary natural source of light comes from the sun and that caused earth to create
environment and could be converted into food through photosynthesis. Now light comes in
various shapes and sizes and from different artificial sources (Mikuriya 76-80). The
discovery of fire by our ancestors was a crucial breakthrough for human development. Not
only fire gave them a chance to cook, it gave them a source of light, which helped them
survive in vicious conditions which would have never been possible without light. 1.5
million years later, light is still the most important part of our daily lives. It makes life easier,
it gives a different dimension of the world and it has a subtle poetic value to it (Cadava 66-
128).
Several artists, writers, poets and scholar has written the different aspects about lights.
Famous Italian painter Giovanni Baglione’s painting Chiaroscuro uses a strong contrast
between dark and light. The color play to separate the light from the dark was a breakthrough
art style in 1600s (Robertson 31-44). This technic is used by artist to achieve the volume in
an object, photographers and cinema effects are also based on Chiaroscuro (Crosby et al.
2068). One of Woody Allen’s film “Midnight in Paris” we can see the usage of such technics
to achieve a poetic note.
Like Paris in the movie Midnight in Paris. LA has its own character as shown in Pulp
Fiction. The city of Los Angles is a geographically diverse location. It has the Pacific Ocean
on one side and mountain as high as 10000 feet on the other side. L.A. is the most populated

2LIGHTS OF LA
city in the state of California and second most populated in America. It is also a cultural,
commercial and financial hub of Southern California and is well known for its bay area and
the Hollywood entertainment industry (Yong 593-596). This vast diversity has made its way
to the usage of some really creative and unique and genius way to portray light. From the
usage of the old school street lamps, which gets us back to a nostalgia of the cobblestone
roads and the street lamps, to the now technologically advanced light effects (Rigolon et al.
576-591).
In ‘LA Glows’, the author, Lawrence Weschler describes the late afternoon light of
Los Angeles as “golden pink off the bay through the smog and onto the palm fronds” where
he catches both the aesthetic beauty of the light as well as its interaction with the environment
such as the smog and the palm fronds. The smog, he described as the ‘haze that fractures
light’, to explain the process of scintillation of light due to the smog. While describing the
shadows in the winter mornings, the author used the term ‘strong and crisp’ to explain how
the shadows were sharply contrasted to the environment1. Such description draws a vivid
mental picture of how light interacts with the LA environment.
Lights can be in various form and shapes and colors but light plays the most important
role in our lives. It communicates with our brain directly and vision being the most important
among all our senses, light is hence the most important thing. Light is what defines
something, it amplifies an objects character, it helps build a character of an object with no
definite purpose. The city lights are poetic and mysterious, such things were talked about by
many writers, directors and poets (Rigolon et al. 576-591). The city lights of L.A is as serene
as nostalgia itself. Starting from the commercial metropolitan areas to the bay areas, every
place has its character. These character of the city changes when there is no natural light, the
1 Weschler, Lawrence. "LA glows." New York Times (1998).