I try to go around with a couple of cameras. On the day I took this, I had two Nikon film cameras, one black and white and one colour. I had some errands to run down Sunset Boulevard. I went to a repair shop to have some boots resoled, then headed to Amoeba Music – although it didn’t open until 10.30am. All of a sudden, people started running past me. I thought: “What the hell is going on?” I heard shouts and the words: “Someone’s shooting.”
As I came around the corner, I saw the shooter and heard the bullets ricocheting – bing, bang, bing. I ducked beneath a row of newspaper dispensers. Craig Marquez, a plain-clothed Los Angeles police officer I recognised, pulled up with his partner, and they started running down the street. I followed them taking pictures. When they got to the shooter, Tyler Brehm, he was holding a knife in his left hand. He shouted: “I wanna die.” And then I saw him reach for his gun. Marquez shot him and he fell to the ground. It was so surreal.
I developed my photos the same afternoon, sent them to the LA Times and the next morning one of them was on the front page. People have said: “You’re taking advantage of the victim.” But I thought: “Wait a minute. I do photography: people go purposefully to war regions hoping to get pictures like that.” The whole thing lasted less than five minutes but I had nightmares about it after, about being right in the middle of a shooting. Twelve years later, I still have nightmares.
It turned out Brehm was a prescription medication addict and his relationship with his girlfriend had ended. In the end, it was “suicide by cop”. He had killed someone and was shooting indiscriminately. People with mental health issues shouldn’t be able to get their hands on guns, but in a population of 350 million, how do you control that? We have the Second Amendment, we’re an armed nation. I grew up in Boyle Heights in east LA during the 1990s and it was brutal. I think my experience of that – I’d seen drive-by shootings before – helped me remain calm and take the photos. I knew I was out of range.
Boyle Heights is considered the first Chicano neighbourhood of LA and has the highest density of Latinos anywhere in the nation – 94%. I took cinema classes at LA City College. Boyle Heights was different to the standard view of Los Angeles, so I thought I should start photographing it. There was a competition at a gallery and Freaky 1s, a photograph I took of girls at a party, won the prize. I thought then: “Shit, maybe I’m good at this.”
That picture was part of my project Eastsiders. The photographs were spontaneous, not styled or set up. I think that’s what makes them special – I might just have been in someone’s backyard, having a beer. The writer Gay Talese called his form of journalism the art of hanging out. That’s what my photography is like. I like it to look cool, too. That’s probably what people like about it.
At one time, that’s what photographers would shoot: everything. Now everyone is specialised. I’ve done work for Miramax, a wheel company, the LA Weekly, fashion houses and music labels. I like that I’ve done different things. Sometimes you can’t be so choosy. That’s what I tell younger photographers: you gotta work, you gotta get off your ass and pay your bills. Not every job is the “art of photography”. Some photographers think they’re really special. They act like assholes and I think: “You take pictures!” I never want to be like that.
Gregory Bojorquez’s CV
Born: Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, 1972.
Trained: “Photography classes in high school, and after that self-taught by books and assisting photographers.”
Influences: “Diane Arbus, Martin Scorsese, Bruce Davidson, Larry Clark, David Lynch, John Cassavetes, Richard Avedon, Phil Stern and William Eggleston.”
High Point: “When everything was still kind of new. I had a lot of friends trying to do different things, people who had enthusiasm and drive.”
Low Point: “When things really slowed down and I wasn’t sure I could make it doing photography alone. Leonard Cohen once said he went through the same thing – and that only an artist could know that feeling. It’s horrible.”
Top Tip: “Stay enthusiastic. It’s a challenge when your art or craft becomes your way of supporting yourself, but you have to keep that enthusiasm no matter what.”
