Matt Logue's "Empty Los Angeles" photography book

Matt Logue says: I just completed a self-published book depicting an uninhabited Los Angeles, and it got an honorable mention in the photography.book.now competition at blurb.com! The photos were made over a period of 4 years, beginning in 2005, at a variety of locations around LA.

Empty Los Angeles

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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Anonymous

Ok, now photoshop in the burning car, wrecked cars, and zombies wandering the streets.
mesrop

There are two options for doing this. The first option would be to use filters and do long exposure during the day. It would take hours of exposure with a film camera but it could work. The second option is doing it with photoshop. I actually did something these lines for a final project, but did them as night exposures with out manipulation. If you want to see empty L.A. go out there at 3 am Mon-Thurs.
Anonymous

Japanese photgrapher Masataka Nakano published a similar book in 2000, titled “Tokyo Nobody.” Highly recommended.
Anonymous

["Tokyo Nobody"] is clearly the inspiration for Matt Logue’s effort

or he could have just come up with the idea independently, which has been known to happen
searconflex

I like the one of the bed.
annoyingmouse

Ah, typical human arrogance. One of those photos clearly has a bird flying in the sky. Not so empty LA!
k1p

I was in LA during the riots in 1992, and I thought to myself that it would be a good time to film some stock footage of empty LA street scenes for future use.
WalterBillington

I love this – it demonstrates that it’s people, not construction, that makes cities messy.
jfrancis

I think that red building is where Silicon Graphics was (is?)
jfrancis

There is a somewhat automated method for doing this in Photoshop Extended – the image stack with layers combined using the median filter

http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2007/03/safe_humane_tou.html
Anonymous

Isn’t that how it always looks?
hobomike

I’ve lived in LA on and off since 1990 and once in a while, while riding around on my motorcycle, the streets are so empty Morrissey’s “Everyday is like Sunday” comes back to me. It can look like a ghost town at times, like when the Lakers are in the playoffs or on Thanksgiving morning. Eerily stark and somber, especially to someone who grew up in Manhattan…

That photo of the 405 is most amazing. Usually it looks like a parking lot.
adamnvillani

So, are these photos altered, or did he just take the pictures really early on Sunday mornings or somesuch?
ZehnKatzen

That’s pretty evocative. When I saw that, I thought of every “collapsing society/deserted cities” movie I’ve ever saw, because just as calamities tend to destroy New York on film, depopulation seems more likely than not to be exemplified by an empty LA.

I wonder if there’s a gestalt-y subtext going on there.
YokoYoko

As Anonymous #9 said, Nakano Masataka did this in Tokyo and that book is clearly the inspiration for Matt Logue’s effort. And as Anonymous #9 said, Nakano’s book is highly recommended. I’m sure Logue’s is equally fascinating.

Portrait of the post apocalyptic megalopolis …
uricacid

there’s a section of town in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that looks *just* like that. I knew they captured the feel of SF and Vegas with the other parts of the map but having never been to LA I didn’t know they did such a nice job with it as well.

true story.
Anonymous

in fact yes, i think if you take enough pictures of a scene and the stack them with enfuse, you’ll remove everything that moves as “noise” and be left with the static scene. its a neat idea, and takes a lot of patience.
GlenBlank

mesrop is right. I’ve always been a night owl, and, weeknights at 3 am, LA is astonishingly quiet (except in the residential neighborhoods with trash pickup the next morning – those have a constant parade of scavengers taking the deposit bottles from the recycling bins).

I’ve gone out for walks at 3 am, and I can be out for an hour and never see or hear anyone else. Just me and the coyotes.