Excerpt from “The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory” by Norman M. Klein

"I am not implying that L.A.’s neighborhoods have no public record at all; quite the contrary. The photo archives of vernacular Los Angeles are indeed gigantic, running into millions of images. … However, these cannot compete with hundreds of movie melodramas where downtown is a backdrop. … Some locations are simply easier to transfigure than others, for heavy equipment to be positioned, or cheaper to rent; and they therefore figure more powerfully in the public record, while others never appear. Indeed, Los Angeles remains the most photographed and least remembered city in the world."

http://guides.latimes.com/literary-la/