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.

Urban Walk

As part of my research we went on our own psychogeography walk. We did not plan this walk but walked adrift through the city not walking through an area which we would ordinarily do. This was to explore the city in a new light and see new places.

Below are the images I captured on the walk. I have split them into sections/topics I may wish to explore further within this project. My first set of images concentrate on the idea of architecture. I thought it may be interesting to look at new and old architecture within the city and signs on the buildings as to what the building once was and what it is today.

I felt this building was very interesting. it stood in our university car park. It has no use and has not been used in some time, but why is it there? Why have they started knocking it down but then just left it?

This pipe clearly used to link to a building, but the building no longer stands there. It interests me that this pipe is left with no use yet it still remains as if there was a building still stood there.

I find churches very fascinating buildings within the city. The grand size and scale of the building show how churches used be important and standout. 

I particularly liked this building due to its sign "Manchester and Salford Savings Bank". Today we see banks of big modern buildings but this show a building that looks like it could be a house.

My next images focus on abandonment, things that just seem to be have been left behind and forgotten about.

The two images of gloves above interested me as when I took my images the other hand was missing, so not only had someone lost their glove but they only lost one of them. I also liked the decay on the glove suggesting they have been there a long time and no one has picked them up and thrown them away.

 This image shows an egg shell that has fallen perfectly inbetween some double yellow lines. Not only that but where is the yolk? There is only shell there, this is why I believe this to be an interesting image.

This image clearly shows what most of used to living within a city to see every day, rubbish abandoned/ disregarded without a thought.

I also liked this image due to the thought of how a person can lose one shoe.

When I captured this image I was thinking about the idea of standing on things you would not ordinarily stand on. This is a door I am stood on, doors are usually open and closed not stood on.

This door says "joey's room" on it, suggesting that it was maybe a child's bedroom door, but now this door lays in a car park abandoned there. I liked this image as it does make you think why this door is here, what happened to the family?

This image amuses me because of the idea that theses bananas are on top of someones house.

My next images are about the city's transport.

This canal is a man made river system which runs through a city which was made for transporting goods. Most inner city canals are abandoned nowadays due to more economically affordable roads providing a more direct route to many destinations.

I thought I may focus my project on traffic.

Along side transport comes road names and places because transport takes you to places and you need to know the name of a place to get there.

I liked the way in which the only canal sits next to the sky line of the city.

This image was taken in the train station. I find it fascinating how much waiting we do, waiting for trains, buses, taxies etc.

This image shows a group of people as a train arrive. I like the expressionless faces everyone has expressing a boredom in waiting.

I also looked into the idea of feet. Our feet take us everywhere and I was interested in the idea that if I took images of just feet walking past do we still make an expression of what type of person they are. I thought this project would be great to do in the city as it is so busy.

Within this image without seeing the woman in the middles head I assume is a very smart person who is possibly dressed for work.

I partially liked this image as all three people are wearing the same shoes. It certainly reinforces that we like people who like the same things as we do and in fact they are all wearing the same shoes.

From just seeing this man's shoes you get a feeling due to the messy, dirtyness of them that he does not care much for his appearance.

I like these images as I do make assumptions in my mind as to the type of people I had phtographed wihout seeing the rest of their body. I also liked the busyness on everyone, which to me certainly suggests the city.

Richard Billingham

Richard Billingham: Black country series

I liked this series as the images all show a yellowy, orange glow created by the street lamp, this gives the images a sinister aura and maybe creates a feel of uneasiness about the area, almost as if you would not be safe to go there.

Philip-Lorca Dicorcia

"DiCorcia alternates between informal snapshots and iconic quality staged compositions that often have a baroque theatricality.

Using a carefully planned staging, he takes everyday occurrences beyond the realm of banality, trying to inspire in his picture's spectators an awareness of the psychology and emotion contained in real-life situations.His work could be described as documentary photography mixed with the fictional world of cinema and advertising, which creates a powerful link between reality, fantasy and desire.

During the late 1970s, during diCorcia's early career, he used to situate his friends and family within fictional interior tableaus, that would make the viewer think that the pictures were spontaneous shots of someone's everyday life, when they were in fact carefully staged and planned in beforehand. He would later started photographing random people in urban spaces all around the world. When in Berlin, Calcutta, Hollywood, New York, Rome and Tokyo, he would often hide lights in the pavement, which would illuminate a random subject in a special way, often isolating them from the other people in the street.

His photographs would then give a sense of heightened drama to the passers-by accidental poses, unintended movements and insignificant facial expressions.Even if sometimes the subject appears to be completely detached to the world around him, diCorcia has often used the city of the subject's name as the title of the photo, placing the passers-by back into the city's anonymity. Each of his series, Hustlers,Streetwork, Heads, A Storybook Life, and Lucky Thirteen, can be considered progressive explorations of diCorcia’s formal and conceptual fields of interest. Besides his family, associates and random people he has also photographed personas already theatrically enlarged by their life choices, such as the pole dancers in his latest series."

http://www.jameslomax.com/words/501/philip-lorca-di-corcia