Picture Show: Mathieu Young’s “Walkabout”

the contrast and range and everything is just phenomenal. 

i would goodmark this twenty times if i could! 

and hurrah for bruins staying in LA.

Great captures! 

love it. fantastic idea and beautify shot. 

Terrific! Glad you found at least one interesting African-American in your walk.

I love your photos. I would love to see more of your Downtown LA shots.

These are pretty awesome, I’m loving the contrast on these pictures.

 
Feeling the cold.

Today, in
my heart, there’s
a delicate
sorrow; outside
a melancholy tries
to forget the
sound of a
manner that
now disappears,
while a young
bird escapes…..

Francesco Sinibaldi

wow. just came back from my first trip to LA and i must say this series makes me want to go back immediately.

As a newbie photographer with a nice digital camera, this was a great post to peruse.Thanks for the ideas and the art!

you really are quite an amazing kid, aren’t you…

The photos look amazing! It must have been an amazing experience. Definitely something I must do at least once in my life. 

Excellent pictures! & although I don’t have the photographic skills that Young
possesses, I did the same thing here in Portland. It was the funnest time I have ever had with my camera!  

Awesome pictures! I really enjoyed his election coverage, too. There was a New York Times slide show with a bunch of his work and it’s really similar to these photos.There was one of Obama giving a speech in a storm that was incredible.Keep it up.

Great pictures!  Were the pictures taken in the 80s or 90s?

2008 not 80’s or 90’s

Is that the best route you could have chosen to capture diversity at it’s best?  Or was it the prettiest?

My intention while picking a route was to two-fold: On the one hand I wanted to be mindful to show as many different neighborhoods inhabited by as much diversity as possible, but I also had the practical concern of what I could actually walk in the four days I had afforded for the project.

My idea was always to start deep in ‘Skid Row’ downtown (where I had previously spent a week working on a photoessay), and to move West across the city, ending at the ocean. Picking the route I took between those two predefined points was a little bit more fluid, a lot of it was determined by the physical layout of the streets; where I could actually push my light down the sidewalk. But I think that the path that I ended up taking afforded me a look at many different ‘cultural pockets’ and diverse outlooks on the city. Its amazing how much the city changes between Downtown and Echo Park, or Echo Park and Silverlake, or Hollywood and West Hollywood, or even from Santa Monica to Venice. I can understand the popular notion that all of these places are gentrified and homogonized, but walking through each of these neighborhoods I can attest to their diversity.

Had I months to dedicate, I would have loved to walk to every corner of the city and pursued this idea to its end, but for the four days I had to spend, I am proud of the path and people that I found.

And, as always in life, I think that the beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Any of these streets and scenes can be beautiful or ugly, depending on your perspective.

Thanks to everyone for the comments and feedback!

I loved this slideshow.  Great job.

Wonderful concept and execution.  Well done.

Awesome. Great photography.  You could do an abbreviated version on the Metro, I think that’s the 704/4, from downtown to the beach through echo park/sunset. Just observing the broad diversity of people getting on and off is cool.

Very cool idea. Great photos.

Beautiful!

Great work Mathieu! Love it…!I was wondering about the large strobe. Your shadows are hard, so I’m thinking NO softbox or umbrella, is that right? And it looks as though you used high speed sync to wrestle the sun to the ground so-to-speak in many of the photos. Or was that all done in Photoshop? Did you use any light modifiers? Anything to restrict the light as in grids or snoots? I have a fascination with light these days and have so much to learn… For four days of shooting, I would be thrilled to have captured images as these.