About this book

Originally inspired by the apocalyptic vision of a depopulated British capital portrayed in the 28 Days Later film, this photographic project explores London like most have never seen it before. As this city never sleeps, these pictures took several years to complete and involved two Christmas Days, many early mornings, all-night scouting trips and countless missed opportunities.

The result is eerie, quiet, beautiful and - I believe - hitherto unseen. It is the absence of life that makes these otherwise ordinary images into something special.

The life they don't show accentuates how busy and bristling with life London usually is. Thus these empty city scenes turn into pictures of the imagination, even of a state of mind. The photos may even be regarded as an expression of an inner vision of available space which in daily life is noisy, contested and crowded.

Whichever approach may relate to you, I hope you enjoy this view of London without anyone in it.

Enjoy the silence.

 

About the author

Internationally acclaimed photographer Jiri Rezac has been living and working in London since the 1990's when he started his professional career at Reuters News Pictures. Subsequently he has specialised in shooting portrait, environmental and current affairs assignments for some of the world's leading editorial publications and campaigning clients.

His pictures have appeared in Geo, Time, Vanity Fair, New Yorker, Forbes, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Sunday Telegraph, Der Spiegel, Focus, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Welt am Sonntag as well as in a variety of corporate magazines and websites. In recent years Jiri has also undertaken extensive assignments on global environmental issues for organisations such as Greenpeace and WWF.

As most of his work is assignment-based and usually involves people, this project was borne out of a desire to do something different, something at odds with the tradition of documentary photojournalism.