Beautiful City - Empty City

Beautiful City—Empty City showcases the architectural photography by Leonid Furmansky shot in downtown Houston during the pandemic. Selected from a portfolio titled Oil Towers, these images depict the city we know so well as a mostly empty and evocative canvas for exploration.

The isolation experienced due to COVID-19 is visible in the vacant, frozen quality of the images. Shot largely at night, these images see downtown in a new way. They invite speculation not only about the quality of Houston’s architecture, but also the systems and economies that both finance and maintain it.

Leonid Furmansky is a Texas-based photographer. He is driven to document structures that represent the way we live. Leonid’s work has been published in the New York Times, Divisare, Texas Architect, Dwell, and ArchDaily. Leonid spends his free time documenting rural and overcrowded cities and experimenting with film photography.