For significant parts of 1991, 1992 and 1993, I lived in the one room apartment shown here on McCadden Place in Los Angeles, near the then trendy Melrose Boulevard.

In those years, I worked my way through the familiar tasks of graduate school, the paper writing and the grading.

In the evenings I would take walks from Highland and Melrose over to Fairfax and Melrose and back.

While I lived in this apartment the LA riots took place in 1992.

With my neighbors I stood outside in the late afternoon and watched the skies fill with smoke, heard the sirens screaming, and felt the city shut down.

I saw a man taking a rifle into his apartment.

In the morning, a few shops were damaged near me. In the days that followed there were a surprising number of burnt buildings and broken windows around Melrose and Highland.

These are self-portraits because notwithstanding occasional dating, by and large this was a period of life lived alone.

I left McCadden Place to share an apartment with another graduate student in the summer of 1993. As it worked out, I ended up marrying his sister in September 1995.