the City

Researching... Researching... Researching...

Going through my research I was looking at photographers whom photographs I find really interesting. Personally I think that pictures of a buildings in the city doesn’t describe city at all, they are more like a postcards for me.

City as an architecture.

I started my research from Andreas Gursky who represents city as a massive line production. By his photograph he gives a critical look at the effect of capitalism and globalism on life.

His photographs are just pushing to go to the city and find something more than just a building...

Later on I just asked myself ‘isn’t street photography kind of city pictures?’ I look around my room and I’ve found book which I bought in a charity shop. I though why not to look inside. And then my brain stork come over.

Buildings makes a city.

People makes the city.

Book called ‘a global snapshot for the digital age’ is organized way much better than the Internet, where you sometimes struggling to find something interesting.  

In this book I found tones of super random images taken by people around the world. There different themes, such a family or New York.  Basically I was more interested in the cities.  In the part with snapshots from London I had really weird feeling. Some of this images I knew, I could recognized the place, even I could say 

that I spent there a lot of time, but I have never seen this place from that angle.

Matt Stuart

"I had been waiting on this corner where there was a good cross light. So the sun was coming from the left across the street I was facing.  I was waiting for people to be lit by the sun whilst leaving the background in shadow. I had been waiting for an hour or so and was feeling very aware of everything happening around me when I saw these three men walking across the pavement and all touching their faces. I cut across the man in the foreground taking one frame which is the one you see. They were gone. I think it is one of the most spontaneous photographs I have ever taken.”

Stuart is fascinated about people and the way they live their lives. But what is really interesting is that Matt shots photos from perspectives which create an illusion of objects and situations that don’t exist in reality. 

  

He is one of the best examples for being in the good time in the good place. His photographs are taken in well-known places but they capture image which you see and forget in the same second.  

I’ve found this interview so cool. I used ‘cool’ because I couldn’t find any other word describing it. I really refreshing, taking so far away about strict thinking about the city, something extraordinary.

Matt Stuart

Born in 1974, Matt Stuart was raised in the leafy suburbs of Harrow, North West London. He admits to a less than distinguished school career, but was called upon aged 11 to play a trumpet solo in front of the Queen Mother. Her Majesty’s reaction is not recorded. A little later, in 1986, Matt discovered skateboarding after watching the film “Back to the Future”. Skating occupied his every waking moment until 1994, when he looked up from the half-pipe and noticed that girls had got a lot more interesting. He also indulged in a brief, ill-advised affair with Kung Fu. Matt’s father, keenly aware that his son would never be the next Bruce Lee, introduced him to photography, handing over books by Robert Frank & Henri Cartier-Bresson. Ever since then, photography has been Matt’s overriding passion, although he’s still quite interested in skateboards and girls. (But thankfully not Kung Fu).

What have you got planned this week?

This week I am arranging an exhibition to be held at the KK Gallery from the 4th – 26th February. I have been getting prints made and buying frames and have frantically been trying to think of a name for the show… which I have now managed. It is going to be called “Look Both Ways”.

What do your parents think your doing?

Shopping, they asked me to pop out and get some milk, in 1998

Who do you look like?

I am a mixture of Quentin Tarantino (on a bad day) and Rupert Everett (on a very good day)

What’s your favourite sense?

Sight would be too obvious so I’m going to go with touch.

Tell us something people don’t know about you…

I’m left handed, have a double jointed finger and almost lost my thumb when I was younger. I resent the fact that cameras are not made for lefties.

Did your education count?

My traditional education didn’t count for much, but I grew up skateboarding and I learnt more about people and life doing that than any school could have taught me.

What word can’t you spell?

Dyslexic

Tell us a good fact

The London Underground logo represents the circle line and the central line.

What’s Next?

A mediocre UK based fashion outlet.

What’’s your ‘Plan B’?

I’m already on Plan D, I would have to put on my pads and try skateboarding again if photography fails… 

Weegee (Arthur Fellig)

He was following the city's emergency services and documenting their activity. Much of his work depicted unflinchingly realistic scenes of urban life, crime, injury and death.

‘He will take his camera and ride off in search of new evidence that his city, even in her most drunken and disorderly and pathetic moments, is beautiful.’

In his pictures he include city but people of the city were more important.