L.A., What’s Your Sign? : People tell us what they do and don’t like about their city. You’re in for a few suprises.

It isn’t easy to get your say in L.A., which is why we assigned freelance photographer Gregg Segal to ask people what they like and dislike about life south of the Ventura County line, a task that quickly evolved into a surprising lesson about stereotypes. “We don’t give people enough credit,” Segal, a 10-year resident, recounts. “I was pleased to find people had a lot of things to say that weren’t typical.”

Segal’s use of the camera as interviewer made a splash during the O.J. Simpson trial, when he first had people record their feelings on signs. “All I would have to say was something like, ‘What about the glove?’ and they’d be off,” he says of the resulting photos, which were featured in Harper’s magazine.

For the L.A. survey, the 32-year-old photographer made it a point to seek out people who represented the city’s diversity. “My idea was to find a sampling of different backgrounds, ethnic and economic. I wanted something more original than, ‘I don’t like the smog.’ ”

And what does he like about the city? “The Punjabi Sikhs in turbans on Lankershim and the Mexican men in black cowboy hats on the same block and the Armenian grandmothers walking ponderously with their arms folded and the dog lovers at the Lake Hollywood dog park and the old guys who have been playing tennis in Vermont Canyon for 30 years and the women in Silver Lake who look good in thrift shop clothes,” he says. “But I don’t like that the checkout woman at Lucky has a screenplay she’s trying to sell and it has a better chance of being produced than mine, and that everyone in L.A. is pitching something--you can see it in their body language around the tables at the cafes.”

The answer that surprised Segal most was from a homeless man. His observation, “There are a lot of beautiful people who care,” caught Segal off guard. “It fell into the original idea that using the text with the photos gets you past just judging people by their images.”