Night Crawling...

When I read Toby Barlow's hip and vicious first novel, SHARP TEETH, I fell in love with his version of LA as much as his bloody werewolf/love saga. The LA of SHARP TEETH is more the stuff of literary collisions than pop horror. Part Chandler, Chavez Ravine and Mike Davis. It's an LA of unpopulated streets, lost neighborhoods and dry brush bordering cracked concrete. A shadowy stage for the violent doings of the book's feral gangs. So, I began to shoot pictures in pursuit of this LA. We did a show together, last April, over at Lost&Found Gallery in Hollywood, which got the ball rolling...



...Since then, I've begun a tour of the LA that carries on indifferent, perhaps even hostile to, the self-obsessed culture jockeying for exposure under the "HOLLYWOOD" sign. The whole venture smacks of a very particular kind of voyeurism, and often finds me standing in pitch black alleys at 3 am, waiting for something to resolve, standing on rooftops staring into windows or listening outside hulking factory walls as steam rises overhead. It's a journey of uncertain destination, but the LA that I'm finding on these late night sojourns is beautiful to me, a Hopper-esque universe of desolation, history and hallucinatory luminosity.


In his series of gorgeous silver gelatin prints, NIGHT WALK, Henry Wessel explores a sleeping LA of bungalows and Tim Burton shadows. So I suppose one could call this work the LA of Lycanthopes (and other altered-states) and late-shifts.