Scott Lane’s life looks a lot like the movie Nightcrawler. He’s a freelance overnight news cameraman, meaning that every night, he films car crashes, fires, deaths, and shootings in Los Angeles.
Under the moniker Loudlabs News, he sells his often grisly footage to news stations, running the whole operation out of his car, which is filled with radio scanners, camera equipment, a portable wifi hotspot, and a couple of laptops he uses to edit and upload video. His jobs starts in the evening, when traffic slows down and the freeways open up, and it ends a couple of hours before sunrise, just in time for the morning news broadcast. He’s been in this line of work for the last 15 years, and although he doesn’t see himself as a documentarian, he has recorded the dark side of LA as much as anyone else.
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The scenes he photographs—a teenager wheeled away on a stretcher, a man electrocuted by a telephone wire, the aftermath of a drunk driving accident—can be gruesome. “My reality is people’s most harshest realities,” Lane often says.
Los Angeles-based photographer the1point8 spent a week with Lane, documenting the crime he trails every night. These are some of those scenes.
See more of the1point8’s photography on his website and Instagram. See more of Scott Lane’s work on his website and YouTube channel.
