
All images by Ken Hermann. Used with permission.
Hollywood has been known to many as a place to go in order to pursue one’s dreams to become a star. But for many, it doesn’t seem to work out. Those people often fall off and do other jobs. They’re the focus of photographer Ken Hermann‘s project called Hollywood Characters. He is the winner of the Hasselblad Masters 2012 for his City Surfer work and has a book out now collecting some of his work.
Hollywood Characters is subtitled as being “The dead-end of the American dream.”
According to the series description:
“Amongst the bustling crowds and chic boutiques on the streets of Los Angeles are a cast of costumed characters, waiting for curious passersby to take a photo.The street characters make a living by letting themselves being photographed together with the thousands of tourists who visit the Boulevard each day and pay them a tip them to take a shot.
Some of the Street characters does a really good job acting as look-alikes and they actually look a lot like some of the big Hollywood stars while others just look like silly grownups in poor and dirty carnival costumes.
Most of the street characters have one thing in common though. They are, or once were, pursuing the American dream of becoming someone special and famous. It is this struggle mixed with the childish fantasy world ken Hermann finds interesting to portrait.”
The project started when he became fascinated by the good look-alikes and the bad ones. Spending time observing them, he found that sometimes a person just needs to have a funny or crazy attitude to be successful. But in this project, Ken tried to show off who the real person was behind the disguise.
Continue reading…