City Focus 7: Dublin by Igor Bilic

Social flats in Dublin, Ireland became a symbol of poverty, drugs, alienation from the state and
social problems in Ireland from the 1970s. It’s inhabitans have their own culture, dress
code and accent, and in general dont mix and socialize with other dubliners.
Those people are called “knackers”(equivalent to”chavs” in the UK) by mid and upper Dublin classes.
The government is gradually demolishing those buildings, but social problems will not go
over night, as social divisions are rooted in the society.

http://www.flickr.com/people/igorbilic/

City Focus 6: Dusseldorf by Manolo Perulli

“I am attached to my hometown, Düsseldorf. I grew up on these streets and I have recently learnt that there are new things to be discovered when you have a camera in your hands. All the details of the buildings, situations and people are more obvious when you look at them through the eye of the lens.

I am satisfied when my photos might represent some sort of a mental travelling to Düsseldorf for those who watch them and to transport the whole feeling of the city.

5 Questions for Juergen Buergin

• 1) How long have you been taking photos?   Two years.
• 2) Why do you take photos? Tell stories.
• 3) What’s your favourite camera? The one I’m having with me.
• 4) Favourite Location? New York
• 5) Favourite Lens? The one I’m having on my camera.

  

  

  

  

  

  
  

My Manchester must be built by David Crausby

My Manchester must be built; a construct of my imagination; sampled from regular return visits to my homeland. The city continues to mutate; my photographs are traces and fragments of a different place that is almost unrecognisable and difficult to locate.

The Party started to unravel in 1990. I left to live in Tuscany, Italy. But I couldn’t keep away. Two years later, I was back and the party raged on; living there during Euro’96 when the pigeons rained down onto the pavements. The sonic boom of the explosion giving them instant heart attacks as they attempted to swerve and soar away from the blast.  The bomb ripped the heart out of the City centre and the expensive and efficient rebuild changed it forever. The old gold was growing thin. The music was stuttering and the party was drawing to a close.

By the start of the new century I had relocated to a village on the Northern border of England, six miles from Hadrian’s wall; the antithesis and antidote to Manchester and not an unpleasant shock to the system. Three years later in 2004, my next step expelled me from the UK altogether, to a new party, a new life, in Germany.

Although estranged from the city that helped shape me, the separation has never been complete. I often return to be with loved ones and to attend the matches of Manchester City Football Club. And when I’m back, I become furniture; a table, a bar stool. I fit right in, like I’ve never been away; just an unobvious tourist who loves being home..

Many of my recent images betray other emotions of disassociation, alienation and gradual disintegration. New developments such as Spinningfields hold no attachment for me and deep down I feel a glow of satisfaction that I spent so many good, good times in this city because my Manchester no longer exists…

City Focus 5 Adelaide by Gary Sauer-Thompson

City Focus 5 Adelaide by Gary Sauer-Thompson

Adelaide is now my home town. Though it is the capitol city of the state of South Australia
it is a small regional city; one that is trying to reinvent its rust bucket image from the steady
decline of the manufacturing industry --white good and cars --in the 1980s to the present.
In all likelihood it will be huge expansion of BHP Billitonʼs Olympic Dam (copper, gold and
uranium) that will enable the state to have a different future.

I started photographing the city by photography the urban neighbourhood in the central
business district where I live in a townhouse. This area --the central market precinct--is in
a process of change: more people are moving into the city to live, the lawyers are set up
their offices, and the international students are buying and renting the newly built
apartments. That change got me started on my urban wandering with a camera.

Gradually the photography took on a broader focus of exploring the CBD area itself and I
took to wandering the streets with a camera. The Situationists (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Situationist_International) called this wandering dérive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dérive),
by which they meant an unplanned journey through an urbanscape that an individual
travels; unplanned aimless strolls (photo walks) that act to edge us out of the banalities of
everyday life. The subtle aesthetic contours of the surrounding urban architecture and
geography subconsciously direct my walking and wandering.

The purpose of dérive is to experience an entirely new and authentic experience of the
different atmospheres or ambiances in which we are stepped. These collective and public
moods (Stimmung in Heidegger http://heideggergroup.blogspot.com/2008/01/winter-
week-3-meeting-part-iii.html ) constitute how the world matters to us, and how we find
ourselves in the world. The process is one of letting myself be drawn by the attractions of
the terrain and the encounters I find there. It is away we find ourselves in a world as world.

Through moods that we are attuned with the world. Moods provide the background against
which specific events affect us. They colour how events or situations show up for us, 'close
off' other possibilities, and open up the world in a particular way. They bring us face-to-face
with ourselves as being-in-the world.

Psychogeography (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychogeography) for the Situationists was
a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities...just about anything
that takes people as pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new
awareness of the urbanscape.

This conception of urban wandering refers back to the older concept in Charles Baudelaire
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Baudelaire) and Walter Benjamin (http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Benjamin) of the flâneur (http://nosve.com/writing/
LaFlaneuse.pdf), who makes social and aesthetic observations during long walks through
Paris.

The street photographer is seen as one modern extension of the urban observer, and with
the development of hand-held (Leica) cameras in the early 20th century, the camera has
become the tool of the flâneur: Susan Sontag in her 1977 essay, On Photography, claims
that the flâneur with a camera finds the world picturesque ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Picturesque. )

My urban photography emerged out of the Situationist conception of urban wandering and
through it I started to represent my Adelaide.
sauer-thompson.com/thought-factory/pixelpost/

Five Questions for Ahmadjaa

1) How long have you been taking photos?

Well, I started around 2008 but only recently in the early 2011 that I found the fun and enjoyment of photography.

2)Why do you take photos

Simply because am loving it and it makes me happy

3) What’s your favourite camera

Olympus E-5

4) Favourite Location?

That would be anywhere in Malaysia. Does not matter which city but for now am here in Kuala Lumpur and Selangor.

5) Favourite Lens?

Zuiko Digital 12-60mm SWD

Marie Noëlle Taine

Tout est venu de la lumière, dans l’enfance. De la substance de l’air sur l’épiderme. Cela avait un nom, poésie, mais je ne le savais pas. J’étais une plaque sensible. Aujourd’hui je parcours la ville, je me fonds dans cet espace en expansion, j’y disparais, je deviens invisible. Alors commence la connaissance intime, à chaque seconde tout me happe, tout m’impressionne, les choses se révèlent. Photographier est un voyage de fond, la vie même.

Everything came from the light, in childhood. From the substance of the air on epidermis. This had a name, poetry, but i did not know. Today I go all over town, I melt into this expanding space, I disappear there, I become invisible.

Then intimate knowledge starts, every second everything snatches me, everything impresses me, things turn out. To photograph is a long-distance travel, the very life.

City Focus 4: Lisbon/Lisboa by Robert Ashby

“Hora Lisboa 2011” (A few hours in Lisbon, 2011)

I had wanted to visit Lisbon for a long time – friends had said how much they enjoyed it, and as a result I had formed ideas in my head of how it might look and feel.   It turned out to be different.   More of a melting pot than I had expected, more variety, more graffiti, less coherence and less comfortable.   No doubt if you spend more time and get to know a circle of friends there, it can very very engaging and convivial.  Even though there are some set pieces in the city, they are not the real theme, which is more bohemian and urbane at the same time.

My photography is very much about human spaces and what they say about the lives that the occupants and users lead; how we create the signifiers within them of what is to be said about these places where we spend our time.

Five Questions for Toni Tramezzini

1) How long have you been taking photos

for about 2 years. for about 1 year in a semi-professional way.

2)Why do you take photos
easy: because i like!

3) What’s your favourite camera
leica m9

4) Favourite Location?
i have no favourite location but i love big cities like new york, london, berlin, vienna. in cities like that i walk around with my camera and try to get to know the city. the photographs i like the most are the ones when i find a silince in the bustle of the city. i like places as well which are crowded in summer but empty in winter / fall.

5) Favourite Lens?
50mm and 28mm

Five Questions for pw-pix

1) How long have you been taking photos
About 40 years with a gap of about 10 years from about 25 to 35 yo

2)Why do you take photos
It’s a nice creative outlet that lets me escape the day to day routine

3) What’s your favourite camera
My Nikon D3s

4) Favourite Location?
All sorts, but I like walking around and finding things in both urban and rural environments, and I like cruising around exploring in the car and discovering new things and places to photograph

5) Favourite Lens?
Nikkor 14-24 or Nikkor 24-70