Muddy Waters

Muddy Waters is a photography series based on the fictional town 'Sandy Shores' in the game Grand Theft Auto V. The world called Los Santos is loosely based on Las Angeles and its quite large in scale. The majority of the game revolves around the main city of the game and what your common gamer would image it being surrounded by - city life, pop-culture and riches. A lot of what's neglected in the game is the outskirts of the city and all the other towns that are scattered to the northern side of the map.

You play as three protagonists in the game; Michael - who is a middle aged white man that has a family and lives in a mansion, Franklin - a lower classed black man who's trying to make it out the hood and Trevor - a lower classed white man who's damn near lost his whole mind.

You're given the opportunity to play between all three of the protagonists throughout the game and it's safe to say Trevor is definitely the most insane character out of all three. Whilst it may feel isolating and boring doing missions etc. in Sandy Shores and in the country side; I was oddly attracted by the isolation. How well the game was designed, how the map was carefully curated by the art team at Rockstar Games and how they managed to emulate and encapsulate such a life-like town that has clearly been neglected over-time and is filled with all sorts of interesting characters.

I initially did want the project to be surrounded by the gang culture and poverty in the city. The studio once again did a great job at portraying poverty in the game and there are a lot of social cues and commentary that goes on in the game that caught a lot of my attention. The game has been out for over 10+ years now (2013) and I found myself getting very overwhelmed with how much stuff I kept discovering when I was trying to capture stuff in the city.

I'm not as much as a gamer as I use to and wouldn't even necessarily consider myself a gamer now because I've grown out of it but it did play a big part in my life growing up and it was from taking in-game screenshots from previous GTA games and sharing them in online communities how I managed to pick up a camera in real-life. There's something special about composing images in a game knowing you're in full control. You're the whole crew. No need to hire a light guy - you can control that. No need to hire models - they're available at your dispose. I was at a much more advantage cause I was playing it on PC and I had the opportunity to tweak things around and download modifications etc to enhance my experience but I chose not to.

I decided to settle with Sandy Shores because I've always had a huge interest in outcasts and very much feel like one myself.

Where the name Muddy Waters came from? I accidentally ran a dude over in a monster truck and he fell into a muddy puddle.

I found a new appreciation for the game and although it's 10+ years old, everytime I booted up my PC to get capturing and taking pictures of Sandy Shore residents - I kept getting my mind blown by the genius of Rockstar Games. It's honestly a timeless game. I was also more surprised how I managed to go 2-3 hours without senselly killing people. I had became so accustomed to just booting the game up after completing the story mode and just blowing peoples brains off and running them over to test out the physics engine.

I'm not a psychopath.

I also found it absolutely hilarious how the term "NPC" has been getting thrown around recently everybody like it's some new word. idk.

Non-Playable Character. The fact that people can literally be labelled as an NPC because they lack a personality is just hilarious to me.

Anyways enjoy the project. It was fun to make.