New Urban Disconnect

"Expose the banalities of the new urban landscape" - George Georgiou

This is the nineteenth Instruction for the Street Photography Now Project, written to inspire fresh ways of looking at and documenting the world we all live in.

This challenge was later expanded on the Flickr group thread by George Georgiou:

"Hello all, this is George Georgiou. The quote is not quite how I put it, I wouldn't have used the word Banal. What I am interested in is what the relationship is between a modern planned urban/suburban space and the individual. In other words, planned public space where people can feel comfortable or familiar with but allows people to move through this space without contact, we almost become invisible to each other. Often these are made to a blueprint, airports, housing estates, bus stations, shopping malls etc. If you watch people in these spaces you notice a disconnect, people in their own worlds/minds. It is this disconnect from what is around you that I find interesting. A simple example is how people talk on the mobile, as if they are at home, in private. Eggleston and Shore are good examples of this. What they look at is very 'commonplace'. The urban environment and peoples interaction with it. I hope that helps. George"

I feel that the above image ties in closer to what George said on the forum. The woman is completely lost in thought whilst typing a text. Her expression is fixed and stern, her walk was brisk. The other face in the image adds to the 'disconnection', the woman is oblivious to the man looking at her (and he is oblivious to me).

My 'B-side' this week focused on the banal. I always find that a stringent deadpan approach to photographing is ideal for capturing 'banality'. I love the word banal, and banality is verbalised best in Chris Marker's Sans Soleil (1983)... See the scene here!

-PM

Bus Bricolage

The SPN Challenge for Week 18 stated: "Look for a window. Through a window, out a window or at the reflections on a window" - Arif Asci.

Phew, I made it this week! With the possibility of playing with reflections and refractions how could I really miss it? Natural superimposition? Yes please! Any excuse to use the word bricolage in a title...

Ok, so it was hard not to repeat one of my earlier entries this week by placing myself in the midst of the reflections. Of course, there are times when those images must be taken [see below].

This week I saw the challenge as a great way to explore the experimental and Modernist route. Looking in reflections and through glass allows several perspectives to overlap, or superimpose - to borrow a filmic term. Artists such as Andy Warhol and Stan Brakhage experimented with this process of natural collage to achieve fantastic results.

In this image there are seemingly an infinite amount of worlds converging: the bus, the people in the bus, the world seen through the bus (trees, houses), the numbers reflected off of a shop window behind me, iron mesh from the shop front, etc. The end result is a chaotic barrage of visual, and textual, information; yet, the people in the photo remain perfectly placid and only the viewer is subject to this amalgamated perspective.

-PM

Week 15 - Aimless

Upon receiving the fifteenth brief from The Photographer's Gallery for the Street Photography Now challenge I was elated! "Wander aimlessly most of the time", set by Melanie Einzig. Great, we were given carte blanche for a week. As the days progressed and the entries started appearing on Flickr I had to sit and rethink the challenge. Primarily other photographers were focusing on pedestrians walking, normally, into or out of some wittily composed scenario.

This was not enough for me. Wandering aimlessly can be a meditative state, a vibrant pseudo-somnambulistic experience where you are led by instinct or impulse. Maybe I have spent too long musing on the Japanese philosophy of 'mono no aware', which celebrates the transience of things. Thus, photographing whilst aimlessly walking meant I was capturing fragments of a personal experience and producing a visual record of how I was led, and where I wandered.

-PM

Aftermath...

Week 14: "Show us the aftermath." - Maciej Dakowicz

With limit time this week my photo opportunities were limited to what I could find whilst shopping or walking to and from work. Luckily my work is firmly based on the fleeting moments so I found something quite fitting for this week's brief.

This 'aftermath' scene is the result of a few things: one, bad parking by the guilty owner of the silver car; two, the placement of the car beside the freshly painted taxi mural; and finally, the 'Keep Right' sign pointing at the traffic warden who is upholding his position and booking the silver car.

-PM

Assassin Quest

Week 10. Photograph like an assassin. Silent and sudden.

I started this week with the intention of photographing like a real assassin, with head shots or something directly from Leon. But, in the midst of all snow, I found other photographers out snapping away. So, I began preying on other photographers and, not knowing if they were photographing for the SPN competition or not, recorded them recording the world. I looked at it as Assassin's Creed, cheesy I know...

"When you have to shoot: shoot! Don't Talk"

Challenge 7: '"When you have to shoot: shoot! Don't Talk" - Il Brutto

Make a picture containing The Good, The Bad and The Ugly' - Jens Olof Lasthein

Taken as part of the Street Photography Now challenge.For more info:streetphotographynowproject.wordpress.com/

This was a very open challenge. And, based on the majority of responses posted in the pool thus far, I can see that most people opted for the more obvious interpretation: framing an image to contain three figures to represent the 'good', 'bad' and 'ugly'. And, to be honest, I was tempted to do the same. I also thought about taking the cinematography of Leone's film and applying that to street photography (wide framing, close-ups of eyes, or the fantastic of 'Triangle of Trust' from the film's conclusion).

In the end I decided to take Il Brutto's words to heart and photographed without asking or talking to anyone, which was quite odd. My thinking was to walk constantly and photograph as I went. So, this photography was more invasive and intrusive than my normal street photography, which can be highly sociable and interactive. As a result my style was based more on the work of Bruce Gilden or Mark Cohen than Jens Olof Lasthein, yet I still complied with his challenge.

Street Photography Now - Week 6

Challenge #6: "Never overlook a cliche" - Artem Zhitenev

Taken as part of the Street Photography Now challenge.For more info: streetphotographynowproject.wordpress.com/

The challenge this week asked us to 'never overlook a cliche' whilst photographing in the urban environment. This threw me. Was it better to be fully informed of the established cliches or to just go and photograph the really obvious? Well, studying photography for the past four years or so has instilled too much, I was aware of all of the 'cliches' that can pop up. I get the point of it though: there are still photographs to be had by using previously successful compositions... Not that we would reinvent the wheel by attempting cliches but they have become cliches for a reason.

In the end I went for the seasonal cliche of focusing on the dramatic shadows that winter's light can produce. Also, there is an established tradition of framing the natural world [trees] upon the manmade and industrial world [buildings] that had been stablished long before but perfected in the colour photography of Eggleston to Callahan - another cliche-box ticked!

I was tempted to opt for:

- Images that featured a repetition of colour...

- Images that used the obvious compositional traits. Such as adding a natural frame or border by including walls, posts or trees to create an 'edge' of frame. I prefer this image to my submission to the competition but the other photo fit the brief better.

-PM

[10/11/2010]

Whipping Winds and Heavy Rain...

A shoot with Darkest Era up on the North Coast was more of a battle against time and the elements than anything else! The location, at Museenden Temple and the surrounding castle grounds, were fantastic for achieving a colder colour palette and mixing rural Ireland with heavy metal!

To break up the serious faces, which are mandatory for the portraits, we shot a few sillier images. A batch of the final images shall be posted up soon [as soon as things are sorted with the label].

-PM

[27/10/2010]

July: 24/7

Throughout 2008 I undertook, and finished, the 'one photo per day' challenge. This was a great exercise in discipline (both personal and photographic), and something that ingrained photography practice into my life so thoroughly that thinking about 'an image' became second nature. To see the project visit my flickr set.

In an attempt to recreate the discipline involved in documenting life I set the goal of photographing every day in July. Having fragments from every single day for a month or year means, for better or worse, you forget very little.

The images appear in chronological order.

-PM