Last Night in Los Angeles

Australian photographer David Collier had two weeks in Los Angeles behind him when he found Andrea Villarroel Lua on Instagram on his last night in the city. That’s the whole origin story of the shoot—a message sent at the end of a long trip, to someone whose face appeared on a screen, in a city that rewards exactly that kind of late-night improvisation.

Andrea is a fashion journalist and stylist who lives the vintage life without performing it—she wears the clothes rather than curating an identity around them, which is a real distinction. She also shoots analog photography herself, which is probably why she understood immediately what Collier was after. They started on the Hollywood Boulevard, where the ambient backdrop does a lot of work without asking anything in return, then moved to Collier’s Airbnb once the sun went down, working with whatever the apartment offered. She was wearing vintage pieces sourced for the shoot, and the combination of old clothing, good light, and someone who actually knows how to occupy a space tends to produce something.

Hollywood the myth and Hollywood the neighborhood have been pulling apart for decades. Shooting there now means either ignoring the gap between the two or working inside it. Collier’s photographs feel like the latter—there’s something in them that acknowledges the place’s accumulated weight, the costume shops and the cemented handprints and the light on stucco at dusk, and finds something genuine inside it anyway. A person worth photographing, dressed well, on a last night before the flight home.