Serrano’s Los Santos

You’re not supposed to play GTA V like a designer. The game demands chaos—you’re meant to be thoughtless, destructive, a cartoon psychopath. But Luis Serrano, a photographer from Spain, took his practice into Los Santos and decided to play it differently. He walks around with a camera, composing shots. The light, the scale, the geometry of the city—he’s documenting it like a real place.

What got me is how it reframes the entire space. Serrano isn’t being clever or ironic. He’s just using his tools in a world built for something else. And suddenly Los Santos stops being a sandbox for violence and becomes a landscape. The game has no response to being observed instead of destroyed, so it just sits there, massive and indifferent.

It makes you think about every game world differently. Red Dead as pure ecology and isolation. Every environment as something to move through and see rather than solve or conquer. Games train you into one relationship with space. Serrano’s photographs feel like proof that another mode is always there, even when nothing in the design invites it.