Tag: the city

  • Paraphrase

    Paraphrase

    Light Signatures series, day, colour photograph, art, abstract, abstract expressionism, creative, city street, urban, downtown, cityscape, speed, blur, movement, motion, red, blue, green , muted, streaks, waves, pattern
    Rolling Wave Under Belly, 2014 – Light Signatures :: (click to see more)

    I believe my current fascination with movement stems from an interest in context. I remember years ago reveling in the notion of ambiguous context in images. By cropping an image down to some small element of the original you can find extraordinary but unidentifiable form and texture. Like tiny sound bites of a larger whole.

    The irony – this is essentially what photography already does. It is the original sound bite tool – okay, image bite. Photographs encapsulate and frame the larger world, the larger experience and through various methods tell a story or perhaps more accurately riff on the original story providing a sub-narrative.

    The idea of focusing in on small elements of texture and form has led me to where I am now making zoomed in images of movement – sub-narratives of the whole city.

    If you think about it, deciding on the story is an arbitrary drawing of the line. At some point you say – oh here is the subset of everything of which I am paraphrasing this small part – but how inclusive of everything do you get? The same holds true in the opposite direction – at what point do you stop paraphrasing, producing the smallest granule of the story – perhaps at the pixel or even the quantum particle?

    I’ve decided, for my own reasons, to draw the larger boundary at the city and so far, the smaller boundary at my narrowly focused transient movements through it.

  • Different Perspective

    Different Perspective

    Light Signatures series, day, colour photograph, art, abstract, abstract expressionism, creative, city street, urban, downtown, cityscape, speed, blur, movement, motion, red, purple, muted, pulsing, waves, pattern
    Indigo Squid Beneath Orange Waves, 2014 – Light Signatures :: (click to see more)

    I had to step outside my warm padded cocoon of a studio to clear my head and think for a bit. It’s cold and rainy out there with the birds chirping and Queen street is packed with traffic. It’s good to get a different perspective from time to time.

    I’ve been acting like this line of inquiry I’m engaged in about the city is uniquely interesting but really it’s not. It’s just an idea – one among many. I’m certain I’m not the first to think these thoughts or even to articulate them in this way. But I do bring my own unique perspective and I suppose that makes a difference in the end – however slight that might be.

    Really all we can ever do is cast our ideas out into the world to see what others might think of them.

  • The City/Body

    The City/Body

    Light Signatures series, day, colour photograph, art, abstract, abstract expressionism, creative, city street, urban, downtown, cityscape, speed, blur, movement, motion, yellow, orange, muted, streaks, pattern, sunset
    Orange Jupiter Squall, 2014 – Light Signatures :: (click to see more)

    Staring out my studio window now watching as vehicles and people struggle to move about in this winter snow storm I imagine the city as a body – somewhat geometric in design but organic in it’s deference to the geography of the land.

    Referring to our highways and byways as arteries – we are corpuscles – cells of the body moving about carrying out our duties – living out our lives within the life of the city. We are the miniscule creatures of a reef accreting the city around us as we live – industriously building and changing it.

    These are documents of the flow of this organism – of which we are a part. And more, they are documents from within the organism – from our miniscule perspective – enveloping our emotion – dilated and disengaged from time.

  • The Shape

    The Shape

    Light Signatures series, day, colour photograph, art, abstract, abstract expressionism, creative, city street, urban, downtown, cityscape, speed, blur, movement, motion, yellow, blue, muted, streaks, layers, pattern
    Cold Ground Warm Horizon, 2014 – Light Signatures :: (click to see more)

    In a recent conversation I made an off hand comment about the shape of the city, then immediately realized how important the shape of the city really is to me. (Funny how the really important stuff comes out of your sub-conscious when you least expect it).

    In pondering the shape and how best to portray it – it’s not just the static Euclidean geometry of the space but the passage through it that matters to me. Some combination of the shape and the experience of it. If I could I would include the tactile and aural elements too – but for now I’ll stick with the part I’m most familiar with – the visual.

    I’ve been considering some kind of continuous moving collage of blurred elements but not just linear smears. There have to be irregular elements that emerge at random from pauses in the viewing or moments of interest that dominate the view.

    Scale of the perspective is important too – I think something slightly smaller than adult size – say how the scale of the city would appear to a small child. Everything is larger to a kid – distances are greater, time is longer. There is grandeur inherent in our youthful gaze – a fresh newness resulting from our innocence. What are these mysterious and wonderful things we see all around us.

    This is what I seek in the shape of the city.

  • Uplift

    Uplift

    Light Signatures series, day, colour photograph, art, abstract, abstract expressionism, creative, city street, urban, downtown, cityscape, speed, blur, movement, motion, red, green, yellow, orange, muted, streaks, pastels, pattern
    Pastel Glissando, 2014 – Light Signatures :: (click to see more)

    You know, I think I’m ready to get out and shoot some new material – finally.

    Looking at the Light Signatures source material today, house keeping files stored in the wrong place and discovering missing material on my camera, I realized – yep, it’s time. Maybe even time to re-evaluate what the city means to me.

    I was mulling that over on my ride home yesterday – trying to envision something, anything. But nothing yet. Although, I’m still enchanted with the idea of layering and juxtaposing elements somehow and encasing the whole menagerie in a block of resin like some prehistoric insect in amber. And catching sight today of an earlier experiment, stitching and blocking city images as an abstracting layer, I realized I still want to explore that too.

    But neither of these thoughts are fully developed – no idea how I’m going to pull them off. It’s time to get back out and start looking with fresh eyes for new material that will fit so I can figure out how they’re going to look.

    I guess that means I’m mostly done with Light Signatures. Hmmm. Sad in a way – but uplifting too. Exciting times – new ideas, new possibilities. We shall see where this goes.

  • Pattern Recognition

    Pattern Recognition

    Light Signatures series, day, colour photograph, art, abstract, abstract expressionism, creative, city street, urban, downtown, cityscape, speed, blur, movement, motion, turquoise, orange, muted, streaks, layers, pattern
    Orange Vacillations, 2014 – Light Signatures :: (click to see more)

    When working on finishing an image – actually even before that – when scanning through the palette of raw material assembled together for a project – I engage in pattern recognition – looking for something. It’s best as much as possible if I don’t do this on a conscious level but rather feel my way – kind of how I imagine it would be if I were sightless and could feel the subtleties of texture and tone in an image with my fingertips.

    In university I took some interesting psych courses and in one of them we did experiments on each other – okay that sounds creepy but really they were totally innocuous. The one experiment I remember was about our inherent ability to recognize patterns. One of the cool things about our brains is how they’ve evolved to recognize patterns – a useful trait for keeping us alive when we want to distinguish danger from dinner.

    Apparently this skill stems directly from the massively parallel structure of our neural makeup. All very cool and interesting – but to me extremely useful when I want choose and finish an image.

    I am a pattern recognizer, finding patterns in the city – presenting patterns for you to recognize – patterns that quite probably mean something different to you.

  • The City In Motion

    The City In Motion

    Light Signatures series, day, colour photograph, art, abstract, abstract expressionism, creative, city street, urban, downtown, cityscape, speed, blur, movement, motion, green, blue, muted, streaks, waves, layers, pattern
    Green Wave Washing Over Red, 2013 – Light Signatures :: (click to see more)

    When I first moved to Toronto and began studying the city as my subject I was focused on geometry as the defining element – I suppose this was only natural considering I had been concentrating on the shape of the rural environment for so long prior to that. But I was disappointed with the results. I struggled to find a way in – a way to decipher what I was feeling about living here. The geometry was cool but it wasn’t getting to the root of my emotion.

    Several important and defining changes happened during my first few years in Toronto – two career changes, my mother’s death from cancer and an abrupt decision to return to school.

    In the fall of 1998 I began working full time in downtown Toronto at CityTV – the temple of cool. Literally a month prior I talked my way into the full time advanced photography program at Humber college. Neither were planned ahead and both were too exciting to sacrifice for one another, so I did both – with certain difficulty. The other day I realized, this two year period from 1998-2000, while working at CityTV and attending Humber, was exactly when my perspective of the city changed from geometry to motion.

    It had something to do with my exploration of video while at City combined with my fuller understanding of Photoshop and colour control from Humber. It was around the late 90’s that computer non-linear video edit systems were getting ubiquitous and powerful enough for editors to do interesting things with the time base – like jump cuts between slow/fast speeds. I remember speed jump cuts first appearing in car commercials. These speed changes and my own experiments with long exposure night driving video shoots fired my imagination.

    While at City I had access to cameras, computer edit gear and people with knowledge – it was an incredible time. I think of it as the two years I got paid to learn. There were essentially no boundaries between departments and I wandered from engineering to graphics learning everything I could absorb from everyone about video production.

    This video influence infiltrated my study of the city and quietly shifted my focus from geometry to motion.