Ends: Friday, December 12, 2008

Brief: Find words or text that appeal to you anywhere in your environment. Wait for “something interesting” to happen, with pedestrians, with light, with framing, with angles! Anything creative that strikes you.

In photo challenge #7, we asked you to find things that were “not quite right”. We were amazed by the various submissions that we received and began to think of how our project offers this amazing opportunity for street-level exposure to so many urban centres around the world. Photo challenge #8 has further exploration of this topic at it’s objective.

Street photography became possible in the early 20th century when advancements in technology made it possible to carry a hand-held camera on one’s body. There was much excitement in the ability to capture “everyday life” as the common man experienced it. Street photography allows us to consider how what we see everyday impacts what we know about the world. Considering text as a common thread in urban life adds a common thread from which to view many street photographers’ works.

In the photography of Walker Evans, the visuality of urban life reveals important cultural information about his early 20th century work. At the time of his black and white street photography, capitalism was very much changing the appearance of city streets as the ability to mass produce goods brought about consumerist culture. As we readily recognize, urban street signage dots the landscape:

New Orleans Street Corner, 1935

What does this photo tell us about the urban setting in which it was taken? We can extract a lot just through a quick glance: what language is spoken there, what kinds of products are consumed there, what kind of cars are driven there etc. etc.. Objectively, it’s also relevant to look at the scene as a whole and consider how drastic the advertising really is in relation to the entire scene. Only the fruits and vegetables in the shop window remind us of the natural world and the resources that many of our products are created from.

Later, Fred Herzog mostly documented the changing streets of Vancouver, a city on the west coast of Canada, revealing again, the almost-overwhelming presence of street signs and advertisements, as the city moved from “backwater town” to a world-class city with many desirable goods and services for its inhabitants.

The above photo, taken in Vancouver in 1968, brings colour into the visual spectrum of street photography. The viewer is bombarded by brightly coloured neon and back-lit signage, “games, guns, movies,” “western gym,” “washington.”  

Most street photographers at this time were still using black and white, while Herzog preferred to work in Kodachrome, and shot on slide film. Although unnoticed for years, his work is now recognized as an important body of historical photographs.  Today, the colours, font and designs of those streets signs are associated with forgotten signage in dilapidated and run-down neighbourhoods. The fact that his slide films were just recently developed into prints for exhibitions provides an extraordinary opportunity to look at “new” prints that contain outdated cultural information, including fonts and colours that we no longer associate with contemporary  city scenes.

Arcade, 1968

Herzog also created some interesting use of text in his street photography. One word in the photo below hangs in the frame of a very theatrical San-Francisco moment. What is it about the word “only” that continually piques our curiosity each time we look at it? Here, Herzog has selected a moment in time, well aware of the text that lingers in the top of the frame, something we’re hoping our photo challenge participants will consider as they go out looking for inspiration.

Vercruz 96

This October 18th is your chance to finally see the fruits of your labour! The Surrey Art Gallery Techlab is hosting an afternoon open-house from 1-5pm to show you some of the achievements of the Glocal Project!!

As you know, the Glocal artist team has been busy in the TechLab hacking, coding and building systems to manipulate how we make, view, and think about digital photography. Now, their interactive exhibit invites visitors to experience thousands of photographs made locally, and globally, on a giant touchable screen! The interactive prototype uses a specially-designed camera vision to sense the movement of your hands across the table, revealing photographs connected by human and machine perspectives.

This afternoon event will also invite you into the TechLab to experiment with custom built digital cameras – like a remote controlled toy car that takes photos!

One of the things that we are looking at in this project are the myriad relationships between images. Some of these relationships are clear – photos taken by the same artist, images from the same town, or with a shared tag. Other relationships are hidden a bit deeper. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working with software (Processing, Flash, PHP, C++) to make some tools that can help us explore these unseen links. Here are some early sketches from this work – showing some ways the links and pathways within the Glocal Pool can be explored:

flickr.com/photos/blprnt/sets/72157606955337736/

If you look hard enough, you may be able to see your own images in the networks! With 1,200+ images, I had to pick some photos at random to be the ’seed’. Hopefully soon you’ll be able to try this out with your own images. This is a similarity map, with a fairly high tolerance. The ring around the center image is made up of the images that are most similar to the seed. From those images, the offshoots represent more similarity chains. The farther you get from the center, the less similar the images are to the seed:

 Here’s the same map with a lower tolerance:

 This is a colour map, showing images with similar overall colour to the central image:

 And one more: 

You can see the full photoset here.