Sunday 22 April 2007

Urban Landscapes, Part 1

Pin It Conventional wisdom usually says that photographs need to be beautiful. "That's a beautiful shot", you might hear someone comment of a glowing sunset, etched in yellows, oranges and pink.

But these picture-perfect images are by no means a reflection of the everyday landscape; of the real world with the effects of settlement and urban life. They are of an idyllic world, perhaps a holiday, or, in a worst case scenario an image manipulated to have extreme saturation or near perfect water reflections. For that reason, these images are much, much less saturated than the artifice of an oversaturated world that we have come to expect.

In this, the first part of a body of work on urban landscapes, one finds that there another world, perhaps lacking in the traditional romantic vision of nature and beauty, but one we have made for ourselves, and one that is part of daily life in our cities and towns.

Cameras Canon S3 IS, Nikon D40

















2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Peter,
Doesn't everyone want to escape this urban reality, and want the super saturated holiday type image in their heads.... Palms fronds and oranges and yellows.... Beachfronts, bikini clad women, and warm sand and surf... Makes this urban reality worth escaping, it gives hope.... One sees bus loads of them from up country to the sea shore, just to have that poster image realized... How does it fulfill their dreams is worth looking at..... Sometimes the poster of the travel destination is more appealing than the actual experience.........

Peter Bendheim said...

yes, you are probably right...I'm busy on a project on travel destinations right now that looks at the reality vs. the poster experience.
Thanks for the comment.
Peter Bendheim