Mirko Martin’s images in LA Crash look like street photography. And some of them are. The rest are shots of movies sets in downtown Los Angeles, framed so you never see the lights, cameras or crew. The beauty of it is you're never quite sure which is which.
"Like a movie director, the point was to take something that’s fiction and make it look more real," Martin says.
Some of the car accidents are real, and some are action scenes. Some of the people you see in handcuffs really did go to jail, and some are actors. The series is nearly seamless, blurring the line between fantasy and reality. "I tried to capture everything so it fit into the same visual style," he says.
It's his documentary aesthetic that makes the glitz of Hollywood suddenly disconcerting and surreal. There's drama and excitement in every photo—a car flies through the air, a man runs down the street engulfed in flames. Played out in Mirko's gritty style they become perplexing, almost troubling, because they just might have actually happened.
Martin shot hundreds of photos during the five years he worked on the series. He wasn't typically on the movie sets he photographed. Getting an official pass to visit sets is a pain, and he didn't want to be constrained by security. He snuck onto a few, but more often than not shot from down the street, on a bridge, or from another vantage point. He often used a long lens, but tried to keep his kit as small as possible so as not to look like a paparazzi. He used a Canon Rebel because it offered the resolution he needed but made him look like an amateur and not someone to worry about.
Patience was key. Sometimes he’d find a set and walk around for hours to find his angle or wait for the action to start. Other times he’d go get coffee then hope to find something worth shooting when he returned. Martin wasn’t looking for movie stars but did bump into a couple. He spotted Nicolas Cage and Minnie Driver, and saw Robert Downey Jr. on the set of The Soloist. It further blurred the line between the real and the make-believe.
To find real crime scenes, Martin tried listening to the police scanner but eventually gave up the chase because LA's hellish traffic make getting across town a pain. There'd be nothing to see by the time he got there, so he started leaving things to chance. "Los Angeles is just too big," he says.
Martin included street photography in the series because he feels daily life in LA resembles the movies. He constantly saw people driving flashy cars, peeing in the street or engaging in other behaviors seen on set. He's hyper-sensitive to the chaos, which is unlike anything he saw growing up in Germany. It was a shock to see people living their lives out loud.
"I was constantly asking myself why people feel the need to express themselves so vividly in the middle of the street," he says. "Back in Europe everything is more subtle, but in America there’s no holding back."
