Fifth and Spring
Downtown Los Angeles, the corner of Fifth and Spring, in front of the Alexandria Hotel. Over three days in May 2011 Nathan Hope photographed the street around a single event: a police shooting during an undercover narcotics operation, after which the man who was shot died.
According to the Los Angeles Police Department's own account, undercover detectives from Central Area Narcotics were approached near Fifth and Spring at about 12:20 p.m. on May 10, 2011 by a man offering to sell drugs; the encounter ended with an officer shooting him, and he died at a nearby hospital. The original project text dated the shooting to May 9, described it as a drug arrest gone wrong, and noted that the city's police oversight board later found the use of lethal force out of policy.
The installation was not about the shooting alone. Its frames, grouped by day, follow the flow of ordinary and extraordinary events around that one moment in time: the corner before, the corner during, the corner after.
May 9
May 10
May 11
Frames are placeholders; the photographs are not reproduced here. Source for the police account: LAPD news release NR11224rf, May 12, 2011.