Los Angeles is known for its traffic jams, taco trucks, palm trees and sunshine; Electric Moons explores one of its most overlooked design legacies, the streetlight. Los Angeles was once known for the breadth of its innovative street lamps, products of an active civic imagination and a well-timed real estate scramble that did far more than illuminate the roads: they instilled senses of pride and place in a rapidly expanding metropolis, bringing the heavens to human scale, and were public art before the term existed. India Mandelkern examines the art and politics of street lighting in the city from the 1880s to the present day, moving between social history, cultural anthropology, urban studies and the history of design, to show how it framed larger debates about civics and surveillance, infrastructure and traffic, and the definition of public space and who should have access to it. Drawing on her conversations with politicians, planners, preservationists, artists and dreamers, she argues for the streetlight as a totem of the modern era. The colour photographs by Tom Wayne Bertolotti show ornate lamp standards with globes against towers and fog.