Privacy in a big city is difficult to come by. No matter where you are there are people, there are lights, cars, and buses even in the youngest of hours.
Late one Southern California evening I found myself alone on the streets. All the things that keep a city alive were resting.
The pulse of the city had dropped to a few cars per minute, not the average pace of hundreds per second. It is surprising to find that this wasn’t the middle of the night on a weekday. This was a Saturday evening. So I drove… hunting for people, a crowd where the masses were hidden. I thought I may find a covered lot filled with cars but I only found an empty spiral with no travelers upon it.
The CA-101, I-405, I-10, and I-110 all had been swept clean of travelers, I parked sideways on the freeway simply because I could. I saw no more than one or two people at a time and I began to consider the possibility that we were survivors, that we had dodged an epidemic and were left to rebuild our own city.
Before my imagination got the best of me I took the time to capture a few scenes that I thought could express the feelings I had about the evening. I had never known this to be a place of quiet and peace, but it seems everything has two sides and when there aren’t so many voices and horns you can hear the poetry in the streets whispered from the pavement as the city sleeps.
One night I caught Los Angeles with its eyes closed.
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