First set of digital images

After looking at my film images, i went out and took some more on my DSLR. the aim of these images was to show places in and around manchester that society would rather not see.

First set of images

For the first set of images, i went out with a film camera, with the aim to look at images that were different to what you would normally see on your day to day life round the city.

The aim was to create a slight rustic look which shows the decay of neglected items.

Rory Carnegie

Rory Carnegie is another photographer is another photographer who takes an interesting slant on the way in which we view the city. In a number of his images he focuses on the emotions of members of the public who or in their own world sat on a but, maybe going home from work, or in the bus going to work.

However, when i look at these images, i feel that some of them look staged as the people in the images look slightly posed.

Richard Billingham

Richard Billingham

As the focus for this project it The city, I thought it would be appropriate to look at Richard Billingham's Black Country images. In this project he took images to document his childhood neighbourhood Cradley Heath. The work consisted of a selection of images that were taken in degenerated places around that area, with the intention of creating an image that encourages the viewer to think more about the places in which they reside.

The reason why I like these images is that it encourages you to look at the areas of where you live / your local city that you may not look at, or may not often look at.

Alexey Titarenko

One Photographer whose work i particularly like is Alexey Titarenko. I enjoy looking at the long shutter speeds that he uses to generate a ghostly image in the city, of people doing their shopping or going about their daily business. I feel that these images are fantastic for several reasons, and can have a lot of meaning if you read into them. They firstly show just how much movement there is in the city on throughout the day. Secondly i feel that these images show the passage of time really well and how the way in which things change with time differ with this change in time. For example the busy people moving around in a blur shows that we are always changing and dislike being tied down to one place. it also shows how in general we don't like to waste time by aimlessly hanging around. In contrast to this however it the sharp in focus buildings show that although they do change with the passage of time, they are effected much less and slower than we are effected and that they are in-effected buy our over busy lifestyle.

I can also read in to the images been in black and white and ghostly could either show how we pass on from the world into nothingness, or that we often think of memories as foggy black and white and unclear, often being busy and confusing.

Psychogeography

It seems on this assignment we have to be psycogeographers. For this reason I wanted to learn more about what psycogeography is.

Psycogeography was first defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals." For me this definition still needs some unpicking for it to fully make sense.

But it basically means looking at the world a round you and at things in you local area that you see so often you begin to ignore them in a different way, so that you begin to get different ideas in your head and a different image that you may previously never have thought about.

Guerrilla Gardening

Hey, basically when receiving my project brief we had guerrilla gardening brought up and as I had never even heard of this before then I thought it appropriate to do a little research into what it was. Obviously the first place to look would be the website that had been set up to see what information I could find there. http://www.guerrillagardening.org/ I Found that when reading up on their webste that it was about planting flowers in areas of neglected land around out cities.

However, some people do not see it an such a good light "Guerrilla gardening is gardening on another person's land without permission."

There are people who carry out this act of gardening illegal or otherwise, either at night to avoid detection, or in the day time to show their local community that they are trying to make their local area look nicer, and in some cases make a political stand point.

Welcome Back

Welcome back to my blog, and I hope this new Blog will be much more comprehensive than my previous ones, however we will soon find out, wont we.

As per usual i will be focusing on research and development of ideas on my blog and comments, good or bad about my work are always appreciated.