Review - The Environment part 2

In the second part of this assignment we had to look at the urban space, the city. We also had to pastiche another photograph, which was also to do with the urban space.

Firstly, I chose Brassai's 'Paris after dark' as the image that I was to pastiche. Finding the right location during the day was quite difficult because you are unable to see how the lights will affect the street, so this meant quite a bit of time was spent wandering around different areas of towns at night to see if anything would be similar to Brassai's image. I found a street that I thought would work due to the shop signs and the shop window lights though the area was much lighter than in Brassai's image.

For my own ideas into the urban space I decided to look more into the people that you would find there, the people that lived, worked and visited the city. The more I thought about it the more I wanted to show the differences between the people that work there and the people that visit. This led me to Martin Parr's image of Athens with the two different cultured tourists; this made me want to capture images of tourists taking photos of the attractions within the city. For the people working in the city I looked at Harry Callahan's work and Philip-Lorca Dicorcia's, which is quite similar, but because I wanted this series to work as a comparison I did not want to have tightly cropped images of peoples heads. I kept my distance as I did with the tourist images and tried to capture some similarities with the composition, in two of my images I was able to get a single character to stand out this linked these together and in the other two I have leading lines which draw the eyes through the scene.

I enjoyed spending more time in both darkrooms, I have gained more skill with printing and feel that I have progressed with not only my photography but the concepts behind the images as well.