Martin J Waterman

On Saturday I wander through the Santa Fe Art Colony for their Open Studios art walk over near downtown LA. There's a few photographers in the lot and I happen upon Martin J Waterman's series on downtown at night. I was drawn to the eeriness of the scenes of spaces we don't see everyday especially lit by artificial light sources

Prices aren't bad at all. The frames are about 16x20 with the prints around 11x14 at a decent price of around $350+. The art walk is still going on today Sunday (5/3) so head down there and take a poke around !

All of these images were taken in the Downtown Los Angeles area, at night. When I first conceived this project I thought that it couldn't be done, that there wouldn't be enough light. But photography is really all about light, or the absence of it. While I see color photography as being about capturing the subject, I have always found black and white photography to be about geometry, about lines and angles and contrasts, and the perpendicular meeting the parallel. The hard lines of what is lit meeting the hidden lines and gradients of what is in shadow. As I proceeded I realized that the night Downtown was awash with light from a myriad of sources. Hard and soft light, ambient and reflected light, bright and faint light, and always the dark seeking to reclaim these small islands of illumination. It was truly a revelation. And I also wanted to capture the different world that Downtown Los Angeles is at night from the Downtown that we see during the day, the Los Angeles that we don't see at night driving through on the Harbor Freeway or on our trip to the Disney Hall.

mjwaterman.com