New Thesis
Yesterday in the shower, it hit me: a new thesis for grad school. The idea plays off the photography I did in Paris, and this particular post.
I put down some thoughts yesterday:
When I was in Paris, I realized that I didn’t do a lot of street photography, and instead, did a lot of urban city landscapes. I liked the empty streets of Paris. Considering the amount of tourists that go through the city every day, in addition to the population, I found it very interesting to look at when it’s empty. It’s rarely empty. Even late at night, there is still action going on. Even at 5 am, someone is in the street. To shoot empty Parisian streets isolates the city and frames the urban landscape without the steps of people. I felt the real architecture of the city come to life.
I love the way the square format frames the city, So I decided to shoot it with my Hasselblad. . I’d be taking a picture of the area in colour to show the area. I’d also take a picture in black and white to better show the concentration of people in that area. The more people there are, the brighter the image will be. It keeps getting brighter, till it’s so bright that you lose info as a viewer. This is similar to having a lot of people pass through a place. A large number of people passing through a space will visually block your view of a certain area, like a store front masked with the silhouette of people passing by. You’ll only be able to see the place from the spaces between the people, or the tops of their heads. The less people there are, the darker the image will be, until its completely blackened.
The pictures in Paris are a result of hundreds of years of existence, where the city was around, and people interacted with those locations. It’s like capturing a moment in time that had hundreds of years to prepare for it. The events in Syria are happening right now, and I’d be documenting the moment post climax, offering itself as a study on the footprint of people in a given place, especially after the protests and the revolution are done. The difference between Paris and Syria is one of time, documenting it will tell a story on a much bigger scale.
I’m gonna start taking some test shots here. I’m gonna try to do the same place, once during the day (or heavy traffic hour) and once late at night when it’s empty. I’m gonna do some street photography as well to support this work.Here are a couple of images I found that I took that show the same place, but at different times.
