Mark Neville- The Port Glasgow Book Project

I believe the beauty of these images are that they  show crowds of people having fun, not caring about being photographed, possibly because they are unaware of the photographer. The images seem to show a story about this community of people.

http://www.markneville.co.uk/works/the-port-glasgow-book-project-works/index.html
Mark Neville- Port Glasgow
In 2004 Neville spent a year as an artist in residence in Port Glasgow, the world centre for shipbuilding fifty years ago, now a town facing an industrial and economic decline. The result of this stay was a beautifully produced coffee table-style book conceived as a symbolic gift to the community. The book was uniquely delivered, free, to the eight thousand households in the Port by the members of the local Boys Football Club. In this way, rather than having a public artwork imposed upon them, the Portonians received a document of their lives and of their participation as both the hosts and protagonists of an artistic experiment. The book is not available anywhere else, commercially or otherwise, in shops or by mail order.

Many thought that the book was beautiful, an honest reflection of aspects of life in the area, whilst others believed that it showed the community in a negative light, as many of the images were taken in public houses and clubs, and depicted drinking or revelry. In one extreme reaction, the Protestant residents of a street in the Port collectively burned their copies of the book at the back of the local Catholic Club in protest against a perceived pro-Catholic bias in the imagery referencing the respective sides of the secatrian divide. In fact, the balance of images is even.

Vivian Maier

These beautiful black and white images inspired me due to their different look at the crowd and people she is photograping. Her image above of the crowd without trying encapsulates the period, women in head dressed men in hats. The image is taken using such an angle that you can see the whole of the top of the crowd but start by seeign their faces. Her street photography I found really inspiring and the artical below I found while reading into her life.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jan/16/vivian-maier-chicago-street-photography

Vivian Maier often photographed people on the margins; she seems to have seen herself as a fellow outsider. Photograph by Vivian Maier/Courtesy of Maloof Collection

The story of Vivian Maier is so incredible that the man who discovered her says: "If you made this up for Hollywood it would be like, 'Oh, come on, that's too hard to believe.' She is," he adds, "the most riveting person I have ever encountered."
This is 29-year-old John Maloof, a former estate agent from Chicago who has devoted the last four years to unravelling Maier's story. His obsession began in 2007, the year he placed a $400 bid on a box of old negatives in an auction, hoping they might be useful for a book on Chicago's history that he was co-authoring. "Nothing was pertinent for the book so I thought: 'Well, this sucks, but we can probably sell them on eBay or whatever.'"
It was only when the book was finished a few months later that he looked at the negatives again and slowly realised he was in possession of something unimaginably precious. He began printing and posting Maier's photographs to a blog , which he describes as "a snowball that just started rolling and has just been building ever since. Experts started chiming in and they said, 'Holy cow, this is… huge.'"
The people that remember Maier – the Chicago families for whom she worked as a nanny in the 1950s and 1960s – recall a reclusive, eccentric individual, one who spoke in a thick French accent and wore a heavy overcoat and hat even in the height of summer. Her former charges often invoke Mary Poppins to describe her and Maloof calls her, "a really, really awesome person to hang out with if you were a kid. To be honest, I wish she had been my nanny. She would take kids on these wild adventures that only the coolest kids would think of doing."
They had no idea, though, that their nanny spent her days off taking some of the most extraordinary images of the 20th century. When Maier died in 2009 she left behind around 100,000 negatives that no one but she had ever seen. Now, the first exhibition of her work has just opened at the Chicago Cultural Centre and Maloof is at work on a feature-length documentary about her life.
Lanny Silverman, the show's curator, is adamant that "the best of her work ranks up there with anybody. She covers humanist portraiture and street life, she covers children, she covers abstraction and she does them all with a style that I think digests the history of photography."
She was also, he says, extraordinarily prescient: "There's work that reminds me of Diane Arbus, for example, but they were done before Diane Arbus. A lot of what she was doing was ahead of its time."
Many of her images are of people on the margins; she documented the poor, elderly and homeless of New York and Chicago, and certainly seems to have thought of herself as a fellow outsider. It's hard to imagine, then, this intensely private person welcoming the sort of exposure and excitement that her work is getting now. That's something that Maloof has agonised over.
"I hope she's OK with what I'm doing," he says. "She had no love life, no family and really had nobody that was close to her. The only thing that she had was the freedom of her camera to express herself and I think the reason she kept it secret is because it's all she had."
He adds: "I wish I could go back in time to say, 'Look, Vivian, you can show this emotional release to the world. It's OK, people love it – this is going to move the world.

Rut Blees Luxemburg

German photographer Rut Blees Luxemburg - whose work has featured on albums by the Streets and Bloc Party - explores the public spaces of cities. Her work is published in a new book, Commonsensual, and features in an exhibition in London






The angles which she uses within her work I want to incorporate into my own work. She uses high up shots looking down and low down shots looking up. Her images show isolation, they do not show her as being part of the image but her removed from the subject. Her images show a sense of loneliness and isolation.

Luxemburg studied photography at London College of Communication and gained her last formal education at the University of Westminster. She employs long exposures to allows her to use the light emanating from the street only, for instance from office blocks or street lights in her photos.^[ Luxemburg created a series of images for the London Underground in 2007. Many of her photographs and prints deal with nocturnal themes.

Alexey Titarenko

Alexey Titarenko by using long shutter speeds captures crowds as they move past his camera. These images are eery as they are almost ghost like due to the smoke effect created by the fast moment of hands and feet.

http://www.alexeytitarenko.com/about.html
Alexey Titarenko received his Master of Fine Arts degree from the Department of Cinematic and Photographic Art at Leningrad's Institute of Culture in 1983. He began taking photographs at the beginning of the 1970s, and in 1978 became a member of the well-known Leningrad photographic club Zerkalo, where he had his first solo exhibition (1978).

Since this was creative activity that had no connection with the official Soviet propaganda, the opportunity to declare himself publicly as an artist came only at the peak of Perestroika in 1989 with his "Nomenclature of Signs" exhibition and the creation of Ligovka 99, a photographers' exhibition space that was independent of the Communist ideology.

Titarenko has received numerous awards from institutions such as the Musee de l'Elysee in Lausanne, Switzerland; the Soros Center for Contemporary Art in St. Petersburg; and the Mosaique program of the Luxemburg National Audiovisual Centre. He has participated in many international festivals, biennales, and projects and has had more than 30 personal exhibitions, both in Europe and the United States.

His works are in the collections of major European and American museums, including The State Russian Museum (St. Petersburg); the Philadelphia Museum of Fine Art; George Eastman House (Rochester, N.Y.); the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston); the Museum of Fine Arts (Columbus, Ohio); the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston); the Museum of Photographic Arts (San Diego); the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College (Mass.); the European House of Photography (Paris); the Southeast Museum of Photography (Daytona Beach, Fla.); the Santa Barbara Museum of Fine Arts (Cal.); the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University (N.J.); the Reattu Museum of Fine Arts (Arles); and the Musee de l’Elysee Museum for Photography (Lausanne).

Major photo series include "Nomenklatura of Signs" (1986-1991), "City of Shadows" (1992-1994), "Black and White Magic of St. Petersburg" (1995-1997), and "Time Standing Still" (1998-1999). In those series Titarenko paints a bitter picture of a Russia (seen through the lens of St. Petersburg), where people live in a world of unrealized hopes and where time seems to have stopped.

Titarenko's photographic series from the 1990s won him worldwide recognition. In 2002 the International Photography Festival at Arles, France, presented all three series at the Reattu Museum of Fine Arts. The curator of the exhibition entitled "Les quatres mouvements de St.Petersbourg" was Gabriel Bauret.

Two monographs have been published about his work: City of Shadows: Alexey Titarenko by Irina Tchmyreva (2001) and Alexey Titarenko, photographs. Essay by Gabriel Bauret (2003). Soon after being published, this book was nominated for the Best Photographic Book of the Year Prize (International Arles Festival, France 2004).
In 2005, the French-German TV Channel Arte produced a 30-minute documentary about Titarenko entitled "Alexey Titarenko: Art et la Maniere."

Massimo Vitali

"The images are crowded and dense and rich with banal detail. Large masses of people congregate closely together — trying to relax or play — while wedged between the sea and man-made industrial urban landscapes. Tourists suffer together in the summer heat of Europe’s historic attractions, surrounded by contemporary visual clutter and hounded by hucksters...

There is so much happening in each of these photos, and yet nothing is really happening, and perhaps that is what makes them so fascinating, Vitali says his work is the exact opposite of Cartier-Bresson’s approach to the decisive moment, yet the moments he chooses are rich in many other ways."
http://www.lensculture.com/vitali.html

Massimo Vitali
"Over the last couple of years my work has been less focused on portraiture and more about landscapes. I wanted to show that humans are like colonies of mammals living on the coast, but got fed up with beach umbrellas and unruly crowds. Now the subject is nature versus colonisation. Although we try, the force of nature is something we cannot completely destroy.
Working with white rocks appeals to me because against this background every figure stands out. I found some in Sicily, then by chance learned that there were more at Sarakiniko, on the north coast of the Greek island of Milos. I looked it up on Google Earth, then headed there in August in a van with my assistants, equipment, wife and son. The moment I arrived I knew it was the place I had hoped for. I don't explore very much with my work: when I go somewhere I already know exactly what I want to do. Everything is planned.
The appeal of the location is that the sea has been digging its way in to make a little lake, so people stay in the middle of this soft rock formation. It's like a place where penguins could nest or lay their eggs. People feel a cosiness about it. Though it's a well-known spot, it wasn't crowded. I didn't speak to any of the people in the picture: there were some Greek families but it's more of a cosmopolitan place and everyone keeps to themselves. Yet there were some very interesting interactions going on.
I took three or four negatives that first day, and this is one of them. I always think I have done everything I need, but when I develop the negatives I feel that I haven't taken enough. I love this picture, but you always think, "Maybe I could have taken more." That is being a photographer"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/nov/27/photography-massimo-vitali-best-shot

LS Lowry

These images all show crowds in the Manchester and Salford area. This work relates to my work as I will be taking my images in Manchester. The paintings comprise of crowded busy streets. Most of these are painted in such an angle that you can see over the tops of houses and can see the full depth of the crowds.

Groups of People

I like the idea of using my experience of how I felt when new to the city to influence my images. Not growing up in Manchester, I found it unbelievably noisy, busy and crowded. I wanted to take photographs of crowds as people walked past me.

In this image everyone is so engrossed in what they are doing not many even notice I am there.

I thought this image was strange because despite the crowds you can still see grouping appearing.

I feel these images all show what I am trying to convey, which is the busyness of the city and crowded packed places within Manchester. In order to improve this and make it my own I want to use a different view of the crowds but still show depth of crowd through my images. For my next images I will not concentrate on particular people within crowds as I have done here but the crowds as a group.