This body of work is an empirical reconsideration of casual formalism (haphazard hobby photography leaning into new-topographic tropes as an internet folk-art) as it emerged within the mid-2010s analog photography scene, particularly around the frozenwaste.land community and its Los Angeles–centered visual language. Rather than approaching this period nostalgically, the project treats casual formalism as a working method: an iterative, intuition-driven practice shaped by repetition, material limitation, and sustained engagement with the everyday urban environment. Los Angeles functions as a testing ground: a city whose surfaces remain largely static while continually demanding a constant grind via reinvention. Returning to Los Angeles after having failed out of the film industry, I used photography as a way to reassess authorship, ambition, and selfhood in spite of narrative production. The city appeared much the same as I had left it, but the work acknowledges that the photographer does not cross the same river twice. The images mix color and black-and-white, flash and diegetic light and operate as containers for affect rather than vehicles for didactic storytelling. Embracing inconsistency and repetition in equal measure, the project resists spectacle in favor of ambient emotional experiences and open ended reading. The photographs also are grainy, dusty, and frequently blurry; pointing to an emotive framework, the messiness pointing to internal ambiguity and the desire to impart a sense of roughness. The work proposes casual formalism not as a style, but as a framework for making photographs that can rise to rigor, feel lived-in, and pay heed to how images mediate personal and urban experience.