If you’re anything like me, you’ve definitely imagined—dreamed about—a city without the people. Just you, going about your day, no need to fight for parking or wait in long lines. Photographic team Lucie & Simon has helped this daydream along with their award-winning series Silent World, in which they show big cities without all the people. Heaven!
It sounds easy enough—snap a photo and then painstakingly remove all the cars, the tourists, the workaday folks making their way to, well, work. But there’s so much more involved. Using super-long exposures with a neutral density filter, the duo shoot popular sites within a given city—Paris, New York, Beijing—and then remove those elements that don’t fit their overall vision. Some of the shots do indeed have humans within, but few, which leaves the photographs open to interpretation by the individual viewer.
[quote] [Lucie & Simon] endow their photographs with an abundance of unsettling codes, of the most diverse persuasions and origins, particularly those arising from other images. However, these codes don’t focus the images. They serve instead to incite observers to fill them with language of their own experience and their own imagination.” [/quote]
I still think it would be cool to have New York City all to myself for a day …
