Seth Lower’s second photo book, The Sun Shone Glaringly, explores an observation he made upon moving to Los Angeles in 2011: “It isn’t always easy to differentiate between what is spontaneous, or real and what’s mediated. Nothing is ever one or the other.” Throughout the book, while repeatedly announcing the thoughts and actions of our generic “hero,” Lower combines various elements–photographs of oddly familiar filming locations; portraits of aspiring actors he contacted through Craigslist; dialogue and screenplay notations lifted from Hollywood blockbusters; and his own fabricated narratives–to suggest a story at once sordid and hilarious. Like a neo-noir film script referencing works as diverse as Mulholland Drive and Crocodile Dundee IV, Lower’s book evokes all the tropes of the Los Angeles myth to address an essential question: how do popular representations of Los Angeles affect the everyday experience of the city, and how do people negotiate the slippage between their real lives and their potential selves?