Book Review: Gas and Glamour
© Ashok Sinha
By Lana Nauphal
In his new book Gas and Glamour, Ashok Sinha captures the glow of golden-era Los Angeles through the lens of its indomitable car culture and singularly recognizable roadside architecture. Sinha’s striking photographs, replete with bright neon lights, ostentatious billboards, and swooping architectural lines, conjure up a strong sense of personal nostalgia for those who lived through the America of the 50s and 60s; for others, they constitute a revealing monument to the American spirit of the times, as epitomized by Los Angeles itself— a city of stars, and a city of cars.
© Ashok Sinha
A strong sense of mobility, progress, power and optimism—of which the brimming car culture was emblematic— permeated that era of American society. America had its eyes set forward, reaching, and hopeful, for the future: it was sleek, it was fast, and it was on top of the world. The city of Los Angeles itself was a beacon of desire and dreams, a land of possibilities and promise. Sinha’s photographs reflect this intensity of feeling, from the glossy sheen in the glass windows of the San Fernando Casa de Cadillac dealership, to the futuristic, space-like design of the Bowlium bowling alley, captured at an upward angle, in all its glory.
© Ashok Sinha
At the time, America was entrenched in a total glorification of consumerism. Its obsession with the newest car models was a telltale sign, but so was its architecture, which began to serve as advertising for food chains and retail stores. Consumers were now seeing the world through their car windows, and so establishments set out to be as eye-catching as possible in order to lure motorists off the freeway. In the whiskey-barrel shaped building of the Idle Hour bar, and the massive thirty-two-foot steel-reinforced donut crowning Randy’s Donuts shop, Sinha captures the era’s explosion of mimetic architecture, in which the retailers’ products were absurdly enlarged as marketing ploys.
It is easy to get lost in nostalgia, and even escapism, looking at Sinha’s photographs. Los Angeles’s iconic palm trees stand tall in almost every shot, contrasting with the differing hues of the open California sky; the colors are bright and warm, and the buildings so uniquely evocative, that the whole combination invites a rose-colored retrospective of the times. However, if you look intently enough, specific details in the photographs will jolt you right back to the present—the most jarring of which being the recent models of the cars. There are no 1964 metallic turquoise Ford Mustangs in sight, only an array of monochromatic Hondas and Toyotas.
© Ashok Sinha
As the present reality sets in, the shift is poignant, and allows, upon closer inspection, for a sense of unease and displacement to emerge from the photographs. These once luminous and popular retail destinations have become relics of a bygone era, out of place both in current Los Angeles and in our current socio-political moment. Indeed the optimism and aspiration they once embodied now contrast deeply with the hopelessness and anger of America in 2020. And by approaching these photographs with the clear lens of the present, problematic circumstances left unchallenged stand out—as does, for example, the harmful cultural appropriation of Native American identity through the teepees of the Wigwam Motel. This brings us to question: who was this era’s spirit of progress and promise really available to? What particular subset of the population? I think, by now, we all know the answer.
© Ashok Sinha
