Has Los Angeles finally found an answer to the title sequence of Woody Allen’s Manhattan? Revealing the beauty of nighttime Los Angeles in all its glory, Colin Rich’s mesmerising time lapse video “City Lights” plays off the interaction between two kinds of night light: the twinkling stars above the horizon and the pulsating city below.
In an interview with KCRW’s Caroline Chamberlain, Rich discusses the making of the video. “I started compiling images, and I started to see the city in a different way,” he tells Chamberlain. “The way LA was portrayed in different media, and how I saw it in video was not how I saw it. I found these depictions to be very clichéd.” The photographer also recounts a hairy moment in the video’s production when two falcons attacked him atop downtown LA’s 52-storey Paul Hastings Tower. (When he returned the next day, Rich wore a sombrero for protection.)
Published last December, “City Lights” completes a trilogy that Rich began in 2011 with “LA Light“.