Long Beach Gone:  Unfamiliar images of this fair city.  When I set out to shoot this series, it was originally as an act of defiance against the majority of contemporary photography I was seeing.  With the surplus of digital SLR's in the hands of an innumerable amount of people across the earth we’re subject to thousands of images flashing before us daily.  I noticed that despite the infinite possibilities of photography, and the now almost unsettling ubiquity of photographers I was still feeling a sense of redundancy.  Pictures taken from extreme remote locales;  Antarctica, Nepal, Antarctica, China, Antarctica, Madagascar, Antarctica, Antarctica.  The question manifested in me, "Can I create a group of images in my own back yard without having to jump on a plane and go to the ends of the earth to make them interesting?".  So began this series in which I set out to create images of this city, while adamantly avoiding the standard imagery that we associate with Long Beach;  Even going as far as creating a sense of anonymity, where these photos could of been taken in almost any urban environment, and done so with the personally gratifying tradition of 35mm film. Long Beach gone. -Joshua Rayburn