Obsessive photographer of Los Angeles architecture

Last week, the LA Times ran an article about a German tourist named Martin Schall who started a photo gallery of buildings in downtown Los Angeles. He began taking the stark, noirish pictures in 1996 and categorizes his photos of over 1750 buildings by the year they were erected. LA doesn't get the reputation it deserves for its beautiful architecture, but Schall sets the record straight.

In the last 11 years, Schall has visited Los Angeles 10 times — mostly in February or November, when he thinks the light of the city is particularly good.

And in that time, he has gone from tourist to architectural maven. His website, you-are-here.com, has become the ultimate online collection of photos documenting the city. It now includes more than 1,700 images of what Schall thinks makes Los Angeles great.

The website has made Schall a celebrity in the urban design world. Building owners beg him, via e-mail, to include their buildings on his site. And preservationists and other architectural aficionados use it as a bible of L.A. architecture.

But only a small number of his fans realize Schall is not a native Angeleno, an architect or a professional photographer — but rather a German oil and gas engineer whose evenings are spent toiling away on the website from a sleek, sparely decorated loft in Kornwestheim, just outside of Stuttgart.

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