Photography & The City: Photography and the city

Photography and the City - Throughout this course i will be becoming more familiar with different photographic practices in relation to city life. I will be looking at the urban environment from a sociological, anthropological, cultural and visual arts standpoint.

Nicky Bird

Taken from ''http://nickybird.com/'' - ''Nicky Bird is an artist whose work investigates the contemporary relevance of found photographs, and hidden histories of specific sites, investigating how they remain resonant. She has explored this through photography, bookworks, the Internet and New Media. In varying ways she incorporates new photography with oral histories, genealogy, and collaborations with people who have a significant connection to the original site, archive or artifact''.

Through her work entitled Beneath the surface/Hidden Place the central theme of this work is to see how photography and archaeology can be incorporated in ways to speak particularly of the history that is within living memory connected to a certain place or time. The project worked in four different locations across Scotland, in close collaboration with a range of people. The family snap played a central part in the process of the development of this work, and became the central point at which the work began to grow.

What stands out to me is the connection between the old and new. The past and present brought together into one significant moment capturing the passing of time and the development of and area, whether it is still there or is now gone.

Bill Viola

Bill Viola is best known as the leading figure in artistic expression that mainly depends upon electronics, sound, and image technology. His work has a spiritual element to it that explores traditions from both Eastern and Western cultures to do with the fundamental human experiences such as birth, death and aspects of consciousness.

Being a contemporary conceptual video artist whose work appears mostly as video installations One of the major themes in Viola’s work is that it is easy to identify with it – despite our individual cultures and backgrounds, Viola’s art appeals to us as humans largely because we can relate to it.

‘purification’ 2005 - video still

The Quintet of the Astonished, 2000

‘the fall into paradise’, 2005 - video still

Bill Viola - The Raft - 2004

Viola's work was ment to connect with the viewer on a deeper level, as his work was done in slow motion. His art portrayed what in his own eyes saw as birth, death, love, emotion, and espiriuality.

Clare Strand

Clare Strand has assembled a body of work that is both subversive and celebratory in its approach to photographic conventions.

During this period Strand’s art has developed through a series of increasingly interesting and unique projects that have explored various photographic genres, from Victorian portraiture to crime scene and forensic photography.

Daidō Moriyama

Daidō Moriyama is a Japanese photographer who is part of the innovative photographers’ group VIVO, boasting a stunning archive of jarring work consisting of gritty, black and white images depicting the proverbial forgotten alleyways of city life. His stark lens unflinchingly explores everyday objects, cultural interactions, and the contradictory nature depicting the breakdown of traditional values in post-war Japan.

I really am drawn to the grainy, textured quality of his work. The black and white imagery doesn't take anything away from the subjects themselves, leaving the emotion and raw quality to its full effect.

Daniel Meadows

from - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-15717619 - "My work has always been about engaging with people," said Daniel Meadows. "In the early days I was driven by an insatiable curiosity about those around me which probably came from the fact that I had spent my childhood locked up in single sex boarding schools. For 10 years I knew only white middle class men and boys. Meanwhile, out there in the world, the 1960s was going on and people just a year or two older than me were fighting and being killed in Vietnam, tuning in and dropping out, rioting in Paris, watching Hendrix play...

"So, when I left school I went to art college and took up photography. It was a great way of meeting, and getting into conversations with strangers, strangers of all kinds. I had a lot of catching up to do. I soon discovered that, as a photographer, the best way to meet a lot of people was to have a studio.

Portrait of Angela Loretta Lindsey, aged 8, with her brother Mark Emanuel Lindsey in Meadows' free photographic shop on Greame Street, Moss Side, Manchester, February - April 1972

Portrait from the Free Photographic Omnibus, Brighton, Sussex, May 1974

Butlin's Filey, Yorkshire, 1972

Meadows is known for capturing the everyday stories that people often overlook as normal and mundane, thinking nothing of them and moving on.

Garry Winogrand

Garry Winogrand was a street photographer known for his portrayal of America in the mid-20th century. When Winogrand died in 1984, he left more than 2500 rolls of film exposed but undeveloped, 6500 rolls developed but not proofed, and 3000 rolls proofed but not examined. That's a total of a third of a million unedited exposures.

''A collection of Winogrand's pictures of women in public places, mostly made during the decade of he sixties, was published in 1975 ''Women Are Beautiful''. Winogrand's own appreciation of women was enthusiastic and undemanding, and he naively assumed that the rest of the world, at least the rest of the male world, would be eager to buy a book of photographs of anonymous, fully-dressed women walking down the street. His expectations of commercial success were disappointed."

Typically, Winogrand has used a wide-angle lens, capturing the people in detail and also much of their surroundings.

Paul Graham

Paul Graham is an English fine-art photographer whose work has been exhibited, published and collected internationally. He has spent most of his life positioning himself outside of the rules in terms of where a photographer should stand and how they should approach a subject.

He is also known as a watcher, a watcher of people and the space they occupy. He is also able to keep pushing the boundaries of what is accepted by the photographic community.

Man Reading Paper, Bloomsbury DHSS, Central London, 1985, Pigment ink print

Bus Converted to Café, Lay-by, West Yorkshire, November 1982, Vintage colour coupler print

Baby, DHSS Office, Birmingham, 1984, from the series Beyond Caring, Pigment ink print

I like how he is hidden from the subject, and he is capturing them of guard, in there realistic form in a situation that is very normal for some. Capturing the reality of life in secret is what i find quite capturing from his work.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Philip-Lorca diCorcias photographs are a unique mix of documentary and fantasy. With the first two images he set up the scene for each picture, and found men on the street and offered to pay hem to appear in his photographs. The mens names, place of birth and the amount paid form each title.

The careful staging of light is central to diCorcia's aesthetic. For the Hollywood series, he put his camera on a tripod and used artificial and flash lighting to supplement the Los Angeles evening skies. This creates a twilight effect, with rich details and heightened colour, which bathes the subjects with a kind of exotic allure.

Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman is an American photographer and film director, best known for her conceptual portraits.

Her series entitled ''Bus Riders'', is played by the artist herself, always in the same studio setting with the same rough wooden floor and Sheetrock walls. Makeup, hairstyle, clothing, and a few portable "personal effects" characterize the people portrayed, the only other props being a chair or a stool. As if to emphasize the stripped-down yet undisguised artificiality of the setups, the camera's trip wire is always visible.

Kevin Newark

From (http://theexposureproject.blogspot.com/2009/05/kevin-newarks-protoplasm.html)

Kevin explains his series of work titled Protoplasm, 2006 - "My practice resonates around the themes of space, time, anxiety and displacement. In photographing discarded plastic carrier bags found in the canals of East London, I looked to find some solace for the exiled soul of the plastic bag. After short, useful lives, discarded plastic bags enter into a perpetual state of retirement, their spent utility a metaphor for our own mortal anxiety, whereas the demise of plastic is a distant, uncertain prospect. The moment of disclosure (cognition) is delayed to induce a sense of disorientation allowing the viewer to disassociate themselves from the dogma of optical faith."

Gillian Wearing

This set of photograghs consist of a series of images, each showing a member of the public who Wearing had stopped in the street and got to spontaneously write something down on a piece of paper. She then photographed the people holding the paper. Some of the results are a little surprising: a smart young man dressed in a business suit holds a sign which reads "I'm desperate", while a police officer has written the single word "Help!". In Wearing's words, "A great deal of my work is about questioning handed-down truths".

Andrew Miksys

Buses is a series of portraits taken in Lithuania of people travelling on buses. Taken from the street, Miksys captures his subjects through steamy, rainy or frosty bus windows, their faces coming into focus as they lean towards the glass at just the right moment. Everything around these people; the reflections of the outside and shadows of the other bus riders are transformed into an impressionist haze.

With this work his subjects become isolated and are captured of guard and in a vulnerable state. The melancholy of the photographs is emphasized by these peoples expressions; sadness, boredom, lost in their own contemplation. This experience of feeling completely detached from the world, moving through places and people who you will never see again is something which I often cherish on public transport - that realization of being so small and insignificant in the world is quite comforting, perhaps because it is closer to some kind of truth.

Michael Wolf

I just stumbled across this photographer whilst looking for Andrew Miksys. I feel the fogginess and stillness of these portraits really haunting and they really stood out to me. This series titles Tokyo Compression it is described as '' 'Tokyo compression' is a collection of images showcasing local commuters through the aperture of foggy subway car doors. at once a snapshot of the capital city's density, urban infrastructure, and societal makeup, the voyeuristic series captures subjects ranging from sleepy indifference to dazed confusion''.

Phil Maxwell

With this images i could find any sort of explanation for them, but all i know is i find them quite interesting. With the composition of the bus advertisements and the people waiting, there is a sense of boredom, and quirkiness.