There are two things that have drawn me to the photography of Joel Meyerowitz. The first is the stunning rich deep layered colours and the lighting. I have only seen 4 or 5 of his images but the ones I have seen tend to be in the evening sunset and are beautiful. The colours remind me of my time in St. Louis this summer where the hazy vivid humid colours burned into my mind and made me fall in love with what really was a city well past its prime. These are a few of the photos I took in the setting sun in St. Louis one evening whilst I was there.
The other thing I like about Meyerowtiz's photography is the irreverence he pays to the iconic landmarks...or maybe its the reverence he does pay to the normal context that I like. Either way Meyerowitz is happy to find a great vantage point of a landmark such as the St.Louis arch or the Empire State building and then turn his back on it to photograph what is on the opposite side of the street. That normal scene represented is just as real and just as important to the city as a whole organism yet normally gets overlooked, it is from these places that we view the heroic icon, we don't normally view them for what they are themselves. This is partly what Lee and I were trying to achieve with our film of Bradford street for the SMIBE 2011 competition. By showing very frontal images of the normal buildings along Bradford Street we were giving no clues away as to where the film actually was, a slight change of camera angle or a pan would have revealed the Bullring, the Radison, the Cube or various other well known iconic landmarks. That would have instantly allowed the viewer to place the setting in Birmingham and taken the focus off Bradford Street and placed it instead on these icons. For some reason it reminds me of Guy de Maupassant who hated the Eiffel Tower so much he used to eat his lunch at the top of it everyday as it was the only spot in Paris from where he couldn't see it.
No comments:
Post a Comment