Starting Point

MUYBRIDGE 1877, San Francisco Panorama

LEWIS HINE 1930, New York City

BERND AND HILLA BECHER 1966, Prince Albert Dock, Liverpool, GB

The above images were the ones that first inspired me to look into photographing the city for possibly the first time. After a lecture we had on photography and the city, I became interested in the topic and how I had never really considered this 'genre' and way of photographing- beforehand I had mostly concentrated my work on portraiture and studio based projects. I find the idea that a landscape is more than just a beautiful rolling countryside to be extremely intriguing, when somebody says "landscape" to you, the majority of people would instantly think of beautiful trees, fields, mountain ranges. However, looking at the above photographs, they are in ways, just as beautiful as a "picturesque" landscape, except they have been industrialized. This provided a starting point for my self negotiated brief, as I wanted to explore the city around me, using my camera to investigate and capture the detail we don't notice in the everyday. All three images above have been beautified, despite their industrial surroundings. Particularly, Muybridge's panorama of San Fransisco provides a phenominal view of a city we would never deem to be particularly beautiful. I want to adopt this and implement it into my work, attempting to beautify the everyday. 

After a brief one to one session with my tutor, and after showing him these images and explaining my initial thoughts, he brought up a very interesting question; "Why these images?".

What I hadn't noticed when assessing these photographs was that they are all taken from above. This way of creating a photograph provides a subjective view of the place in which is being photographed, it brings the photographer out of the picture, and removes any sort of relationship he or she might have with it. They are essentially looking at the "whole picture" rather than a tiny part of it. This has led me to think from early on exactly what I want out of my images, do I need or want to take on this subjective view? What sort of impact would it have on my own work? What I need to do next, in order to answer these questions, is to think about my subject, what I want to portray and how I will do this...