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Krocky Meshkin

Headless Photo Series Gives LA The Sleepy Hollow Treatment

Krocky Meshkin fills California street scenes with digitally-manipulated Ichabod Cranes.

LA-based photographer Krocky Meshkin is giving LA the Sleepy Hollow treatment. Since 2008, the self-described "paranormal photographer" has been creating composite, Photoshopped images of LA street scenes in his series Headless Sighting. Inspired past jobs in reality television—"The magic to reality TV is everything you're seeing really happened, but your perception is altered," he told Flickr—the work imagines a metropolis that asks, literally, where's your head at? 

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Meshkin's process is simple: he places a tripod down and selects a person in the image who, willing or not, is destined to have their head digitally erased. He then takes more shots of the same location at an identical angle, seeking moments where passersby seem like they are ignoring or interacting with the soon-to-be headless victim. Meshkin then melds the images together in Photoshop—not unlike time-space photo-manipulator Pelle Cass—creating off-kilter, tableau-like street photos where reality and fantasy seamlessly mix without anyone in the frame noticing.

To make the series even more tongue-in-cheekless, the artist printed fliers of his work and hung them around the city. He even included geo-tags of where the pictures, subsequently leading to passers-by taking their own photos of the fliers with the hashtag #headless. Meshkin has since uploaded thousands of these images, an modernized homage to the late, tragic Ichabod Crane.

See some images from Headless Sighting, and watch a documentary from Flickr about Meshkin's work:

The entirely of Krocky Meshkin’s can be seen on his official Flickr page and lurking around poles in LA.

h/t F Stoppers

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