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Photographer Captures the 'Fear and Loathing' of GTA V Subplots

"I'm usually just driving around like Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler, preferably on a motorcycle, looking for strange situations."
Images courtesy the artist

Bat Country comes to Los Santos in a stark black-and-white image series called Fear and Loathing in GTA V, captured by Danish photographer Morten Rockford Ravn. "After losing my camera one day on a wild ride in the woods, I discovered the in game camera phone in GTA V," Ravn tells The Creators Project. "What ensued is a visual meditation on the not-so-often talked about darker side of virtual reality." Inspired by artists like Roger Ballen and Gregory Crewdson, Ravn finds cinematic moments in the dark, dirty, and depraved sandbox of Grand Theft Auto V, like graffiti raging against lost loves, a family living down by the river, or characters with particularly maniacal hundred-mile stares.

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The project, in fact, has changed Ravn's creative outlook: "I don't do real world photography—because it bores me," he admits. In GTA V, however, he can explore subjective reality in virtual reality. "I'm usually just driving around like Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler, preferably on a motorcycle, looking for strange situations or potentially strange situations… The game is filled with social critique, and everything is built with a purpose down to the last pixel, so it's quite easy to come across interesting material." Unlike GTA narative-building photo sets like Casey Brooks' You Only Live Forever and Black English's music video for "There's a Glow," Ravn seeks to find an existing narrative within the game, using just his photographer's instincts, the in-game camera phone, and Los Santos' naturally killer lighting as a guide. Hunter S. would be proud.

Check out Fear and Loathing in GTA V in the images below.

Visit the Fear and Loathing in GTA V Tumblr for the full image set, and see more of Morten Rockford Ravn's on his website.

If you also have an awesome project to share, email us: editor@thecreatorsproject.com.

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