City Lights

When looking at Naoya Hatakeyama's work of the reflections of the city lights on water i thought about capturing the city lights in movement as the movement represents the buzz and livelyness of the city.

When researching into this more i found a few photographers who focus on light movement in the city and one which inspired me greatly is Kristopher Grunert. He focuses on photographing the movement of lights within the city. He was intrigued by the concrete city scapes encased in saturated tones of street lights. Grunert uses a 1972 Hassleblad and long exposures of 10-20 seconds

I tried out some light movement images for myself when out and about in manchester when it had gone dark,

I used 10 sec f/11 for all the shots seen below...

5 sec f/11

15 sec f/11

Disposable camera images scanned in...

While out on the urban walk i thought i would take some images with a dispoable camera so that i had a different type of image rather than just digital. i have scanned in these images so that i can edit and manipulate them. i will be putting the original printed images in my visual diary.

Here are my favourites (unedited)...

Research

When looking at Susan Brights book 'Art Photography Now' i found a section called 'The City', in this section i found two photographers work which i really liked, Richard Wentworth and Naoya Hatakeyama, i also found a photographer in the book which did not do city photography but his work inspired me to do some city photographs in his style.

 I feel really inspired by the composition of Doug Aitken's work, the way he uses the landscape to create these pyramid like images is amazing and i think it would work really well with city landscapes, with all the different heights of the buildings. I am going to research more into Doug's work and see what i can find.

Urban Walk

Today we went on an 'Urban Walk', this was to introduce us to the way Psychogeographers work and i really enjoyed it, i felt instead of walking around noticing all the big buildings and attractive shop fronts i zoomed in and looked closer to the more unplaced objects that you would not notice unless you were looking for them.

Here are a few snaps from today (unedited)...

Edited versions of the images above...



I plan to do another of these 'urban walks' without university so that i can stop and ponder for longer when i see something that catches my eye rather than looking up and being miles behind everybody. I feel i need to take time to look deeper into the city and photograph every little detail that interests me.

At this moment in time i am really interested in the street names and signs within the city, i feel they show personality not only by the name but the ware and tare of the sign and where it is postioned on buildings etc.

Sergey Larenkov

When being show a large array of photographers relating to our new 'the city' brief, one photographer particularly caught my eye, Sergey Larenkov. I feel the way he combines the two images is amazing, the actual editing of the images looks rather easy it seems he has just layered the world war 2 image over his image and erased around the area he wanted to stay, although the effect of the image has a great emotional factor to it, almost like its telling a story.

I would love to do something like this for my brief although i feel it would be hard for me to get hold of old images of manchester as all of my elderly relatives are no longer with us.

Some of my favourite images of his can be seen below,

Psychogeography

On being given this brief today I did not know anything about psychogeography, i didnt know what it was, who was involved, when it started or anything so i decided to do some in depth research into psychogeography...

From research i have learn that Guy Debord defined psychogeography in 1955, in simple terms it is about taking pedestrians (photographers) off their normal, predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape.

As soon as i read this description my thoughts automatically triggered the name Andrew Brooks, i have been interested in Andrews work over the past 3 years and found that he works with cities quite a lot whether it be creating a new city out of seperate images or capturing underneath the city under the tarmac. Andrew has one section of his work which is called 'secret citiies',I found some of these images represent psychogeography and can be seen below...

Obviously Andrew will have had permission to go underground and to these secret places although i feel the concept and idea he has used could be manipulated into images that i can produce for example his stitching technique which i was taught by the man himself is simple and very effective.

Andrew also has a project called New Worlds, this is where he creates completely new places, cities and worlds which do not actually exsist out of a collection of different images...

Urban Walking...

Urban walking is part of psychogeoraphy, i found a website in which it shows you emails between Geoff Nicholson and Will self about urban walking and their addictions to walking, writing etc.

http://joysofpedestrianism.blogspot.com/

'The joys of walking'

They talk about walking as an addiction and i can agree that when i step outside for a walk in the crisp cold air all wrapped up in my winter jumpers that i could walk for hours and explore what i see with my camera, i feel this would be a good starting point to my brief and plan to do this next week with the other students on my course.