Friday, July 17, 2009

A city of Facades


My goal for my photography work, is to show how obsessed our culture is with appearance, facades, down to the way we design our cities. We are so obsessed with how things appear to the forward viewer we forget we live in a three dimensional world, and in a sense we create two cities within one, we create the city that is to be seen and the city that exists behind it. Our focus is the front, and we neglect space behind it. The duality of the suburban city. We create thriving metropolises and ghosts towns at the same time.
The photographs will be taken in two sets, City A and City B. City A being the facades of all the buildings, and city B being the opposite side. The question is do I display them in sets, similar to the Bernd and Hilla Becher, or long strips of film printed on long sheets of paper, like the way a city lays out so you can see the city as it exists in space? Overall I want the cities to have a flat cut out appearance, so the shots will be taken straight on from roughly the same distance to further emphasize the idea that people only think of buildings as they would think of a drawing, only designing the front and neglecting the other sides.
Along that similar note, one could take photographs of each side of the building and arrange them in a grid so one could see all sides at the same time and see the entire building broken down and made flat. Must explore multiple approaches and see which works the best.

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