the arts: Something wild

Los Angeles is a weird place, says artist Charlie White. So weird, in fact, that if one day a large, marauding beast like this one appeared in town, he wouldn't be at all surprised

Strange things are happening in Los Angeles. Fantastic, monstrous creatures are appearing out of nowhere, terrifying the locals, attacking indiscriminately. Have they escaped from the back lot of a new Spielberg movie? Is it some weird millennial thing? Actually, the beasts are the creation of 27-year-old artist Charlie White and they express something of the disorientation he has felt since moving to Los Angeles several years ago from the East Coast. "This city is so artificial and so bizarre that these types of creature really could walk down the street here," he says from his home on the outskirts of greater Los Angeles, in Pasadena, where he has a day job in the computer department of Caltech, the California Institute of Technology.

"Los Angeles is such a highly thematised, highly artificial and unusually fluid place, it does not adhere to any specific identity, so you can impose and create one, it's like an empty stage set." The emptiness of the city, and what could happen unnoticed in those empty spaces, is a key theme in a series of images, which he has entitled "In a Matter of Days".

White's photographs are of course not just photographs: weeks of pre- and post-production have gone into each one. The monsters themselves are the handiwork of special effects designer Jordu Schell. In some cases "live" props were used. Elsewhere - for example, for the image above, Fleming House, Caltech - the monsters were superimposed digitally.