Idea Blog XIV - Urban

The word urban defines much of what my project is about, which is town or city life. In both Artific and Abandoned I introduce the influence of human growth and modernization. When one searches for the urban landscape, links often relate to construction. I find that images of construction are very interesting because each shot is unique. A few minutes or hours later the building has completely changed. On the other side of the rope, when things start to decay you also are likely to not be able to get the same shot. Abandoned buildings and objects are far from static. They are always changing. I tried to focus my projects on the impact of human consumption that comes after the main construction. Tim Davis said in The New New Topographics: Photographs Man-Altered Landscape that images showed places “whose most visible quality seemed a lack of visibility, a sense of unattendedness, of life that has escaped being chronicled—of spaces waiting to be photographed.” It’s interesting to think of buildings that are being constructed as places waiting to be photographed. I wouldn’t think that my furniture was waiting to be photographed but maybe it is, maybe it just takes the correct individual to recognize its beauty. I think that urban photography has the ability to show more than just the material of the environment. Miriam Paeslack states in an article about Maria Sewcz, Wiebke Loeper, and Elisabeth Neudörfl “Their work deals not with the material urban environment and its transformations, but with their use of architectural shapes and urban signifiers as individual psychological topographies. These images hint at notions of loss and transformation, revealing to us subjective, highly selective glimpses of the post-reunification German city [2].” To me this touches on my desire to want more than just to have a traditional landscape. I seek deeper meaning in the ideas that these landscapes are man-made and not natural occurrences.

[1] Davis, Tim. "The New New Topographics." Aperture Magazine Sep. 2010: 16-17. Print.

[2] Paeslack, Miriam. "A country disunited? Urban photography in post-reunification Germany." Journal of Architecture 11.5 (2006): 543-550. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 1 Dec. 2010.