'House for Tree's' - Vo Trong Nghia Architects

Under rapid urbanisation, Vietnam has moved away far from its origins of tropical forests. An excessive amount of cars and motor-bikes, causes serious exacerbated air pollution for Ho Chi Minh City. Globally urbanisation is having detrimental effects on the planet. As a result, people in urban areas are forgetting their connection with nature. This project by a Vietnamese studio Vo Trong Nghia Architects was said to bring green space back into the city, and to be an accommodating high-density dwelling with big tropical trees as a cultural link. Vo Trong Nghia Architects, are uniquely and beautifully designing and creating accommodation for people, whilst expending a minimal global footprint.  Five concrete boxes are designed as pots to plant trees on their tops. The pots are utilized as storm-water basins that hold the water within them and contribute to decrease the danger of flooding in the city.

 

House for Trees by Vo Trong Nghia Architects is a two-bedroom home for a family of three. Built on unoccupied land, in one of the many heavily populated areas of Ho Chi Minh City, which only has 0.25 percent of its region covered in foliage, according to the architects.

"The aim of this project is to bring green space back into the city, accommodating high-density dwelling with big tropical trees. Five concrete boxes are designed as 'pots' to plant trees on their tops," said the architects. Simplistic and clever architectural designs such as ‘House for Trees’, is the future of architecture, aiding to sustain our planet.

 

 

Links:

http://votrongnghia.com/projects/

 

Sebastião Salgado: photographing the faces of urbanisation

Our focus for this blog is primarily concerned with urbanisation – landscapes that have been stamped on by humanity. Sebastião Salgado is a Brazilian documentary photographer whose images range from the most pristine of natural landscapes, to “in-depth projects delving into social issues such as inequity, development, urbanisation, labour, migration and globalisation” (Singer, 2010). 

Salgado has a central theme throughout much of his work, that of an “ongoing visual investigation of the varying relationship(s) between humans and the land” (Nair, 2012). His series of images titled Migrations reviewed the theme of the population movements around the world. I feel that this body of work in particular resonates with the issues and ideas that we are attempting to explore in this blog, about the human imprint on the natural environment. His approach is sometimes empathetic, other times impartial or more of a commentary, but still captures beautifully how displaced and migrating populations are affected and interact with the surrounding environment.

“In recent decades, hundreds of millions of people across the globe have been uprooted from their homes by poverty, wars and repression. Some flee to save their lives; others risk their lives to escape destitution. Most end up in refugee camps or in the slums of Third World cities; a lucky few find a better life in an affluent country far from their own. All in their different ways are at the mercy of economic and political forces beyond their control. The global economic change deepening rural poverty in much of the Third World, peasant migration is creating gargantuan ungovernable cities. Almost everything that happens on earth is somehow connected. We are all affected by the widening gap between rich and poor, by population growth, by the mechanization of agriculture, by destruction of the environment, by bigotry exploited for political ends. The people wrenched from their homes are simply the most visible victims of a global convulsion.”  (Amazonas)

Salgado’s work explores and reveals so much about the human condition, within the context of society and the environment. His documentary approach and style has seen him commit months and years of time to one country, one group of people, for the purpose of “converting the crushing statistics he encountered as a Paris-trained economist into faces, tired and human” (Artspace). He completely ensconced himself in several cultures over numerous years, “immortalizing a vast range of people” (Artspace), and reporting social issues from within, rather than from outside. All of his projects bring to light a social conscience, but it is this Migrations project that resonates the most with me with regards to human impact and displacement on earth, and how that affects the natural environment. 

All images reproduced from Amazonas Images

Singer, A., 2010, sebastião salgado, behind the lens, Contexts, 1 July, Vol 9.3, pp 40-45 

Nair, P., 2012, A different light: the photography of Sebastião Salgado. Duke Publishing

Amazonas Images <www.amazonasimages.com>

ArtSpace <www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/sebastiao-salgado-genesis>

The Cinemagraph

Cinemagraph excerpts from 'Over The Water' - Stephanie Morris*

In Barthes’ Camera Lucida, he reflects upon the differences between the photograph and cinema in relation to pose. He says, “In the Photograph, something has posed in front of the tiny hole and has remained there forever; but in cinema, something has passed  in front of this same tiny hole: the pose is swept away and denied by the continuous series of images.”1

Shave and a haircut... - Jamie Beck & Kevin Burg

While this can usually be considered true, the lines become blurred when we enter the world of the cinemagraph. A fusion between the still and moving image, the cinemagraph offers us the best of both - the stillness of a single moment, perhaps the decisive moment, and the sensory enhancing narrative of movement.

Or perhaps Barthes’ quote is relevant to the cinemagraph. The nature of the cinemagraph is usually in the form of a GIF - a file type which allows the movement to repeat infinitely. One could them argue that the something does not then pass in front of the lens, rather the movement remains in the field-of-view for the lifetime of the cinemagraph, much the same as the photograph. 

If you can make it here... - Jamie Beck & Kevin Burg

Meet me at the bar - Jamie Beck & Kevin Burg

The vanguards of the cinemagraph, Jamie Beck & Kevin Burg’s series ‘NYC’, strongly encapsulate the subtle scents and candid moments  of an otherwise overstimulating city. By presenting the iconic elements of New York in this manor, the duo offer us a taste of the Big Apple, giving just enough away to entice us to want more.

Can you smell the? - Jamie Beck & Kevin Burg

The Neverending commute - Jamie Beck & Kevin Burg

1. Barthes, R 2010, Camera Lucida - Reflections on Photography, trans. R, Howard, Hill and Wang, New York. P78

Bibliography:

Barthes, R 2010, Camera Lucida - Reflections on Photography, trans. R, Howard, Hill and Wang, New York.

Beck, J & Burg, K 2012, Cinemagraphs - NYC, available from: <http://cinemagraphs.com/nyc/>. [23 March 2015].



* 'Click to view 'Over the Water'', a film by Stephanie Morris and Jake Reeder.

Photography and Reality

Photography is timeless - it is a captured moment, a moment that our eyes would not see naturally. We could have created cameras differently to not create realistic-looking images. We have chosen to create our sensors and lenses to produce images that are as close to what our eyes sees as possible. We make photographic images look real - to us. “The photograph is related to its subject or referent by physical contiguity; the camera must be present to its subject; one cannot exist without the other one being there too.” The image can only perhaps be considered to be at least partly representative of reality at that moment when the shutter is released. Before and after that moment the image does not represent reality. There is an overlapping circle of reality - the individual’s reality is objective to themselves, but to any other person it is subjective. So how a photographer captures or makes an image is always completely open to interpretation by any viewer - which will depend on their own context to interpret a photo.

By Stephanie Morris, Liz Harding, Vas Paraskevopoulos and Yana Amur

Bibliography:

Scott, C 1999, The Spoken Image - Photography and Language, Reaktion Books, London

Urban Experience with Rosemary Hawker

“The city has always been a ready subject for photography, its accelerating change coinciding with the mid-nineteenth-century invention of the medium. As such, photography has played a constant role in understanding urban experience.” (Hawker, 2013)

Rosemary Hawker’s article ‘Repopulating the Street: Contemporary Photography and Urban Experience’, from The History of Photography, attempts to explore the typical contemporary photographic discourse of the street, and how photographers are using the ‘trope of the banal as a way of locating the ‘extreme form of the everyday’’ that typifies this idea. There is a distinct direction in this writing towards discussion heavily leaning towards the street and the urban experience, which may be a little off topic with reference to urbanisation and the human imprint on the natural environment. However, the ‘rejected romantic inflection of modernism in favour of a supposedly detached and styleless treatment of the built environment’ that was embodied in works by photographers such as The New Topographics (especially Robert Adams (Image 1), Stephen Shore and Bernd and Hilla Becher)2 hits right in the gut of our topic of discussion, about how and why photographers have sought out landscape images that capture and explore the relationship between the natural and urban environment, whilst commenting on human involvement.  

Image 1.
© Robert Adams - 'Tract House, Westminster, Colorado', 1973 Museum purchase, George Eastman House Collections

Hawker’s essay describes ‘contemporary photographs of the city…[as]…often curiously empty and still, a condition made emphatic in Jeff Wall’s Dawn (Image 2).

Image 2. Jeff Wall, 'Dawn',
transparency in lightbox, 2001.

Such images work against the more familiar image of a densely peopled and dynamic city that excited early modernist photographers and that has informed the genre of street photography ever since (Image 3).’ 

Her argument is constructed for us to see that ‘one could learn much from studying the actual process of urbanisation to understand the relations played out through this photographic trope’. And that ‘the numbing emptiness of the city as found in so many contemporary photographs can in part be understood as a symptom of disciplinary relations internal to photography as an art form and a popular cultural practice’. That is to say, that celebrating the everyday has already been ‘so widely embraced and repeated, as to become generic’.

Image 3. Paul Strand, 'Fifth Avenue at 42nd

Street', New York, platinum print, 1915.

 © Aperture Foundation Inc.,
Paul Strand Archive.

Hawker explains with some examples, just how the literal and banal came to be captured by many contemporary photographers:

"The photograph as transformative or illuminating has been widely celebrated. For example, John Szarkowski writes:

on the evidence of Thomas Roma’s pictures – the light comes down with such sweet sympathy that asphalt shingles and cyclone fences are shown to be as fine as marble, and [. . .] the weeds in vacant lots make us think of Eden.3

This too easy transformation and the overblown and overfamiliar rhetoric for which it has become an occasion is what contemporary photographers who pursue the banal eschew." (Hawker, 2013)

The above is an example of how the focus was drawn away from the magical and the spectacular, towards the everyday street as an acute site for understanding contemporary experiences of the city. 

Rosemary Hawker’s article delves far into the modernist and contemporary angles of urban and street photography. From the ‘formation of the city as empty or full’, to the ‘disciplinary formations of photography in the vernacular or art photography’; and, perhaps most intently, about the urban landscape ‘as an acute site of urban experience’. This is inherently linked to the figures that do or do not occupy space in the image and the reasons why they are or are not included, each ‘offering a solution to the problem that the everyday city has become for photographers – one that simultaneously acknowledges the complex history of its subjects, both the city and photography’. 

1. Hawker, R., 2013, 'Repopulating the Street: Contemporary Photography and Urban Experience', History of Photography, vol. 37, no. 3, pp 341-352

2. Jenkins, W. 1975, 'New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape',

Exhibition Catalogue, Rochester, NY: International Museum of Photography at

George Eastman House

3. Szarkowski, J., cited in Roma, T., Brooklyn, New York:

W. W. Norton 1996, back bookcover.

Adam Bartos: Exploration of Mythical Cities

Late last year, when I was in the middle of my two-week long visit to Los Angeles, I accidentally came across one picture by the american photographer Adam Bartos. The scenery in that single shot seemed strangely familiar, so I got curious and found out that in his other images I could recognize not only the places where I was temporarily staying, but also the new style that I adopted for my own street photography in that city. I felt the connection with his approach and vision, as if 35 years later I was doing the same thing as he did - walking and shooting around the city that seemed very unreal and mythic, which felt to me like merely a set for a video game. Or, as Bartos puts it,“...I had a romance going with LA from film, photography, and television, and the place felt, as it still does to me, unreal in a familiar way. My photographs were attempts to locate myself in the actual time and place, by looking at what was typical but might, or might not, reference the mythic LA in the most oblique manner possible”.

Influenced by the photographers like Cartier-Bresson, William Eggleston and working in the same vein as Stephen Shore, Bartos’ interpretation of LA and Paris is very personal, as he enters these places with calm eyes of the external observer yet exploring them deeper than native dwellers probably would. His work oozes serenity and evens out the chaos of these big neurotic cities. Every image seems to be a window into a parallel frozen world, where things exist on their own, uninterrupted by neither people nor movement.

Links:Bomb magazine interview http://www.adambartos.com/selection/los-angeles/PopPhoto interviewby Iana Amur

Somewhere in Siberia by Pamela North

 

“Somewhere in Siberia” is a series of images created by Pamela North that explores urbanisation and its impact on landscapes and landscape photography. The series expresses how human influence and society, has affected previously untouched natural landscapes.  She mentions the series is to emphasise how vast the human imprint on the world is.

 

The image "Pembrokeshire" represents the calmness of natural environments, although the fence in the foreground represents human input in the landscape that also interprets a sense of ownership. You can say that the photograph has been tainted by human presence.

 

Pamela North has captured images that allows us to see urbanisation of natural landscapes first hand, yet the series of images are shot in a way where we as viewers can visualize and imagine the landscape how it once was before human influence.

 

"The Desert Village" below, also signifies a landscape, which is neither completely urban nor natural, but a combination of both, similarly to that of the image “Pembrokeshire”. The natural environment is the central element in the image, yet the urban aspect is just as significant to represent urbanisation. The isolation of the location, and the nomadic nature of the inhabitants, determines the level of urbanisation.

 

As a viewer of Pamela North’s series, I believe her main objective is for people to realise the impact society has on the natural world and for people to understand the effects of urbanisation, not only the genre of landscape photography, but also the natural environments we live in.

 

 

<http://www.pamelanorth.com/somewhereinsiberiaconcept.html>

 

 

 

 

 

Possession of a Space and the Human-Stamp

“To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge - and, therefore, like power”1

Sontag, puts forward the idea that to photograph something is to place yourself in a position of power in relation to the photographed subject. Sontag also suggests that the act of taking a photograph and the photographs in themselves “help people to take possession of a space in which they are insecure”2.

The idea of taking possession of a space or environment through the art of capturing a photograph is one that resonates strongly with me. Much like capturing of a portrait or documenting an event to function as a memory device, our environments, whether natural or urban, represent a fragment of time. A space can tell us just as much about our history and culture through the evidence of human existence present.

My work aims to capture the in-between spaces and forgotten corners which keep hidden the clues into the insight of our culture and hold onto, if only for a 1/125th of a second, the traces of our history. It explores the idea of the human-stamp on our environment through urbanisation and development. 

As Sontag so nicely says it, “to collect photographs is to collect the world”3.

My work can be viewed at www.stephaniemorris.com.au

1. Sontag, S 1977, On Photography, 1st edn, Penguin Books, London. P2
2. Sontag, S 1977, On Photography, 1st edn, Penguin Books, London. P2
3. Sontag, S 1977, On Photography, 1st edn, Penguin Books, London. P1

Bibliography:

Sontag, S 1977, On Photography, 1st edn, Penguin Books, London.

Stephen Shore: Redefining what a landscape IS and what it DOES

Stephen Shore is an American photographer who creates uniquely deadpan interpretations of social, cultural and physical landscapes (mostly of the United States). As part of a photographic collective called The New Topographics, he, amongst others, focused most of his image-taking efforts into producing images that find beauty, whilst casting a critical eye, over the banal, the decaying urban America. 

Stephen Shore, El Paso Street, El Paso, Texas, 1975

His images are predominantly urban landscapes. They "distill the profoundly ordinary, the daily moments and forsaken sights that compromise much of the backdrop of American life" (Ratner, M., Oct 2005 Stephen Shore, Frieze Magazine). www.frieze.com/issue/review/stephen_shore1/   

So why? Why take photos of the seemingly inane, the unattractive streets and sidewalks of suburban America? And what made his images remarkable?

Stephen Shore, La Brea Avenue and Beverley Boulevard, 1975

Shore leans heavily towards exploring visual structure. Of the above image, taken in Los Angeles in 1971, Shore said: "I was drawn to this scene because… they were questions about how the world I wanted to photograph could translate into an image. They were, essentially, questions about structure…Photographers have to impose order, bring structure to what they photograph… A painter starts with a blank canvas. Every mark he or she makes adds complexity. A photographer, on the other hand, starts with the whole world." www.stephenshore.net/writing


His images capture a banal, almost initially morose, feeling in their approach to suburban America, but he overlaps layers of structure and meaning – his pictures are not merely contemporary and documentary, they "maintain an air of harmonious repose more common to ancient idylls than modern urban life. The quietude is analogous to Shore’s attitude toward his subject – one of pleasurable reflection rather than judgment. He finds moments of exquisite delectation while becalmed amidst ordinarily negligible surroundings." (Maria Morris, The Museum of Modern Art, Photographs by Stephen Shore)

The Man-altered Landscape

Our collective intent for this blog is to explore the urbanisation of the natural landscape, through photographic images. We are photo takers, we are documenters of the environment and people around us, in our society and in the world. This commentary will research other like-minded photographers with a similar intent, and hopefully discuss the validity of their works with reference to cultural preferences, changes and the societal context within which any given image and/or photographer exists.