On Sept. 12, 2001, the magazine photographer Thomas Michael Alleman took a $20 plastic Holga camera and began walking the streets of Los Angeles.

Thomas Michael Alleman

He now realizes that he was photographing grief.

Not literally; he was not shooting mourning faces. Instead, by focusing on signs and symbols of the city, he captured the isolation and desolation of the urban landscape. The resulting series, nearly 100 images titled “ Sunshine and Noir,” plays with the light and shadow of Los Angeles’s collective psychology. Mr. Alleman’s psyche, heartbroken by the events of 9/11, took comfort in the nine-year journey behind the series. “It is a reason to wake up,” he said. “It gives us a structure for our minds, what you think about in your quiet moments, a neighborhood I want to shoot in next week or a type of lens to use when I get the opportunity.

“It gives you a way to fill your mind with hope.”

Though he tries in his portrait and magazine work to maintain complete control of the image, Mr. Alleman ceded a lot to the Holga for the “Sunshine and Noir” project. “During those months I was trying to regain control of my feelings of how the world works,” he said. Like boxers confined to a ring by the rope, the elements in Mr. Alleman’s images seem to fight out a narrative within the Holga’s square frame.

Mr. Alleman has lived in Los Angeles for more than 20 years. He is fascinated by reminders of the myth of the idyllic past; the murals and plaques of paradise. Los Angeles was bought and sold from the beginning, a commercial city conceived by developers and real estate agents. Many of his photographs show the constructed and fabricated elements of the city.

Thomas Michael Alleman

“L.A. is a great environment in which to photograph things having gone wrong,” he said. For example, he said, the innocent Goodyear blimp on its way to a football game takes on the character of a potentially destructive weapon when seen overhead in downtown Los Angeles.

Of course, Mr. Alleman is not alone in seeing a dichotomous Los Angeles of darkness and daylight. “The notion that there is a world below our visible world, the notion that there might be evil going on just below your vision, even on a bright and sunny day — that’s interesting,” he said.

Mr. Alleman sees himself as a novelist, working with a moment in history. “I was going for a photograph that resembled music heard from another room,” he said. “When you hear someone’s transistor radio or someone’s stereo down the hallway, you get the sense of the song — but without the detail, without the sonic highs and lows. Or maybe it’s all lows.”

The metaphor underlines the project for Mr. Alleman. It became his goal, and in many ways the catalyst, for a project whose noise began in New York City and whose ripples found their way into his photographs in L.A.

How will he know when the project is finished?

“I think I am going to keep on shooting until I grow tired of this camera, or the city, or the style of working,” he says. “Staying in it and being part of it becomes the game.

“There is no actual need to shoot the picture anymore, but you still do it. You keep working on it because you are drawn to it.”