Design
Cities Are Surprisingly Menacing When You Remove All the People
French photographers Lucie & Simon have cleansed major cities of their troublesome humanity, creating empty, dread-filled urban landscapes.
When you think of ghost towns, your mind doesn't typically gravitate to New York, Paris, and Beijing. Yet that's what these thriving metropolises have become in the hands of Lucie & Simon, a Paris-based art duo behind the apocalyptic photo series, "Silent World."
Lucie & Simon, who were born without last names to judge from their website, have used a digital scalpel and a special filter to excise the human flesh from city landscapes. They leave just enough evidence of our species' presence – a lone woman in a blood-red coat in Madison Square Garden, for example, or a hoisted flag in Tiananmen Square – to make the mysterious, mass disappearance as eerie as possible.