The photographer Enrico Natali came to Ojai in 1980 leaving a well-regarded career in photography behind and finding in Zen practices of meditation and the management of a life in the wilderness all the knowledge of the world he needed.

In the last few years he has returned to looking at the world through a camera's lens and especially at the kind of forgotten landscapes that lie under bridges, in deserted industrial sites, or among the ruins of highway

construction. In the long series from which these works are taken, he turned to the ever-changing street paintings, from illegal graffiti to sponsored public murals, as they settle into the often abandoned, waste-ridden and decaying surroundings of Los Angeles in which they sit. If you look hard enough, all the visual accidents in these pictures seem essential to the moment they capture -- the bare spot on a peeling wall, the remains of a rusty standpipe in a corner, the echoes of a search for paradise that ring between the noble thought on a mural and the

commercial name of an adjacent spa. In this way, Natali's two great passions -- meditation and observation -- come together: the pictures invite you to look, as he did, at each of these found incidents as grounded moments in time, in which all things are made to belong together by the local artistry, aspiration, pride and imagination that makes art among the wastes of a city's landscape.

Enrico's photographs will be exhibited at the Porch Gallery, 310 Matilija St from November 7 through 25.