Artist: Nicholas Alan Cope, American, b. 1983.

In his striking and unsettling photographs of his adoptive hometown, Los Angeles resident Nicholas Alan Cope signals the acute societal contrasts of the city by rendering its facades as graphic planes of searing white and velvety black, a series of solids and voids, exemplified by Studio City, June 2007 (2013). In both his work as an artist and as a commercial photographer—for the likes of Nike and Dior—Cope treats other subjects to similarly uncanny effect: trees become studies in texture against flat, blown-out skies; lipsticks are blood-red obelisks; muslin-draped models transform into statues of Greek marble.

Framed. Image is 30x20" on 40x30" paper.