CJ Cousins – Eastside Birmingham, UK

12 Sep

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EASTSIDE

Supporting text by CRAIG JOSHUA COUSINS

In the “City of Colour” and cocooned below the skyline of Birmingham’s disjointed modernity lies “Eastside”.

Eastside is where canal waterways and the abandoned factories of its industrial past, still meander through theheart of England’s twenty-first century second city. Ageing walls along disused towpaths provide erudite urban artists with a constant canvas for their colour-focused world of expression. It is against this backdrop that I make my pictures.

Moseley, Birmingham UK

LA River by Tom Walters

1 Aug

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I have lived about 25 miles from downtown Los Angeles for more than 40 years. But the 5 freeway has always seemed more like a barrier than an avenue into LA. I discovered the MetroLink train only about 3 years ago and since then I have made many trips into the city with a camera. I am more attracted to the rusty bits of the city than the shiny parts. It’s the older, well worn areas that draw my eye.

Alistair Hawkins – London

13 Jun

I’m based in London and find myself drawn to moments of solitude in the city. I enjoy the fantasy of having a place to oneself, even if in reality it’s just for a fleeting moment. I’ve always been drawn to fragments of history and imagining London from times gone by. London seems to be changing at an exponential rate, so there is an increased sense of panic in trying to capture things that will soon disappear.

 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/auntiestatic/

Parking – By Dick Snaterse

23 May

I am a Dutch photographer and like to explore urban cities, my own hometown Rotterdam, other Dutch towns but also a few times a year cities like Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Antwerp. It is fascinating to see how cities work, transportation, living, housing, suburbs, relaxation, urban planning, public transport, urban construction, parking and so on. Especially I am interested in the urban city landscape, the beauty of nowhere places, the banal, the ordinary things. Places everybody use and pass by without seeing them. My explorations I do by foot, I walk early in the morning or late in the afternoon, just after sunrise or around sunset, away from the beaten tracks, walk trough back alley’s, enter parkings, enter buildings, climb stairs to find interesting places and locations to photograph them in an objective way just as they are. I try to minimise the human figure in my photo’s because I want the focus on the ordinary place where everything you see is human altered, in that way the human hand is always present in my photography. In the composition of my photos I like to make use of lines, light, shadows and colors. I post-proces my photo’s in Lightroom, if necessary I do some alterations in color balance, contrast, highlights, shadows and sharpening. I like to photograph with a wide angle 17mm lens on my Canon camera or a small handy and light Leica.

I am inspired by the German ‘Dusseldorf School’ from Hilde and Bernd Becher and the American ‘New Topographics’ movement, especially photographers as Stephen Shore, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams and Frank Gohlke. My travels and walkings brings me enough inspiration for photography projects, currently I am working on several projects: Parkings; Road signs; From above; Urban decay; Outlets, Construction, Urban topography and 500 metres.

 

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You can see more of my work on: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dicksnaterse/

Pedestrian Photographs by Jack Toolin

10 May

Pedestrian Photographs were made in the first years of living in San Francisco after moving from Pittsburgh, PA – this was the mid ‘80s. It’s commonly known that Pittsburgh is/was an industrial city – I grew up not far from the steel mills. What is less known is the quality of light in the area: it is often overcast, giving a softer light and sense of atmospheric perspective that attends humid weather. This is the cultural and photographic atmosphere that I grew up with and in which I began photographing.

Adjusting to the light in the San Francisco area was challenging as the light was brilliant and contrasty – no more pretending to be a landscape painter of the Northern Renaissance. 🙂 I adopted the shadows as compositional elements and displayed the intensity of the light by turning the lens towards it instead of away. I discovered that if I used elements on the street to block the sun I could capture the brightly lit scene without getting glare. I was shooting with a Hasselblad C and a Mamiya C330 at the time.

As for content, I sought out the peripheral, industrial sectors of San Francisco and Oakland for my photography. My attachment to these areas stems from my Pittsburgh childhood and was encouraged by the photographs of Lee Friedlander, Lewis Baltz and the like. I was, and still am, drawn to these areas that are both heavily developed but largely overlooked … spaces that people pass through rather than reside in. In the ‘80s it was surprising that so much open space in a large city was available to wander around in, though a different type of wandering than what Golden Gate Park provided. Today these areas (SOMA, China Basin, Mission Bay, Mission District) have been largely transformed by technology businesses and condominiums.

 

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William Real: Still Images of an Evolving Pittsburgh Landscape

31 Mar

 

The ever-changing man-altered urban and industrial landscape fascinates me, both visually and as a metaphor for impermanence and the passage of time. For this subject, Pittsburgh is a photographic paradise. I’m drawn to the remaining industrial architecture in all its decrepit glory, even more so because I know it will soon disappear. The faded and crumbling character of Pittsburgh’s marginal, impoverished neighborhoods also beguiles me. As dilapidated houses are razed or yield to nature, holes open up in the urban fabric, reversing decades of urban densification and creating a landscape of a more rural character. There is a frenetic building boom going on here, structures vanishing and materializing seemingly overnight; brick, rust and aluminum siding replaced by rubble, ditches, scraped earth and piles of dirt, then by scaffolding, construction equipment, steel, insulation, and Tyvek and eventually by uninspired modern architecture, obliterating the memory of what was once there.

In the midst of this upheaval, I also seek out everyday streets, corners and places that are perhaps insignificant and invisible to most of us–so ordinary and seemingly permanent that we overlook and take them for granted, until they start to disappear, and eventually, are forgotten.

While many of my subjects are concerned with inevitable deterioration and loss, I also find that within the camera frame, images of inherent beauty and dignity materialize as if by magic.

Lately my camera is the one I always have with me, a Samsung Galaxy smart phone. This little pocket machine’s images, with post-processing in the digital darkroom, are surprisingly satisfactory for their purpose. The fixed wide-angle lens perfectly suits my usual subjects. I have more fun and less anxiety shooting than I used to with more sophisticated cameras, lenses, and gear.

I’m on Flickr at https://www.flickr.com/photos/real00/

I’ve long admired the quirky volumes and colors of this facade along the railroad line under the 40th Street Bridge. They are tearing it down. By the time I took this image most of the factory behind this wall had been removed. Some developer is building a housing complex there. It’s another small sliver of the old Pittsburgh that is vanishing amidst a boom in the local economy.
The construction site of Garfield’s first Tiny House is visible next to the green house. For me, there is something photographically exciting about the quality of the light and the way the colors red, green, yellow and blue are distributed in the frame.
This scene stopped me in my tracks. I was walking away from the factory and decided to turn around and look back and this was it. The red car sticking out, combined with the other brightly colored elements within a drab, bleak, wintry setting, is what really made the picture for me.
The decrepit steeples of the abandoned SS Peter and Paul Roman Catholic Church tower over a new neighborhood under construction in East Liberty, the most recent of years of housing developments in the area replacing razed failed public housing from the 1960s. The green, red, yellow, cyan, and blue colors in this image are nicely accentuated by the blank spread of snow and sky.
Revisiting this classic strip district scene with mixed artificial/natural light, rail road tracks, warehouses, rust, wet pavement, and reflections.

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Guillaume R – Paris

9 Feb
Since my youth, I have ever been curious about the tags and the graffiti. Why, When, Who does it ?
Step by step I started to take street pictures like in a playground. I live in the suburbs of Paris  and as soon as possible I go and explore Paris and it’s suburban fringes, It’s an endlessly exciting game.
At first, I started watching graffiti but it opened my eyes to others interesting drawings. I’m in love with the dirty and broken city atmosphere .
   I look at  the « beautiful » in the places where you don’t want to live and I try to make sense. I was inspired by a lot of internet session , by people with whom I took pictures and photographers as Bruce Davidson or Marta Cooper.
I created a magazine “Vu dans la rue” (“View in the street”) you can see some online :

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Ariane Coerper

13 Jan
I am a German photographer and discover the past few years the urban environment with the digital camera. Coming out of the painting I give my photos with editing a picturesque and often surreal touch.
Inspired me have the Italian painters of metaphysics as Sironi and De Chirico.
Graphic elements have a great attraction for me what you can see always in my work.
Often I see in banal and ugly buildings and industrial areas a certain beauty and i like to show it in color and sometimes also in black and white.
People can be seen as good as never in my photography, but does not mean that it will always remain so.
Various Canon and since 2015 a Fujifilm X-T1 is my equipement, also Photoshop CC and other software for editing.
My work in photo communities:
And my Homepage:

Empty Streets by Manfred Hofmann

15 Dec

Light and shadow impress me very much. I created many images of small villages that often seem deserted, because I’m on the road at midday.

I want to show this rural life, describe how people live in villages that only have a bus every hours or two. The solitude.. yes, that’s my subject, also village life and beyond, you can see this in my landscapes and other styles of photography I practice.

I take pictures with Pentax cameras, initially a K10 and now a K5 and almost always with fixed focal lengths, usually 15mm or 21mm and periodically 70mm. I use Lightroom and Nik software to post process.

 

Dörfer in der Vorderpfalz 
I have a website:
http://www.lumaho.de/

I show my work at Flickr:

Die Regenfront


And I edit a magazine:
https://issuu.com/lumaho

Daniele Pilenga – I’m from Caravaggio

6 Dec

Born and grow up in the province forces you to some renunciations
but trains the eye to a slower and ritual observation.
Places don’t seem to change and spaces are layered with silent references
so when everything seems empty you can find the real subject.
Time leaves traces to look for and marks to be registered
because every time you see a place you could remember the past time and all your memories about.

I’m Daniele Pilenga and I’m from Caravaggio.
You can see more of my pictures here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/im_from_caravaggio/

im-from-caravaggio.tumblr.com/

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