Ideas for the City Series

My initial idea for the city was to photograph le Belle Époque, the time before the WWI (1890-1914), when cities were in the making and the whole world in the bloom of its entity; world was seemingly carefree and full of potential. I was interested in the works of painters' such as Albert Edelfelt and Eero Järnefelt; their usage of light and colour was something that I was interested in photographing.

Albert Edelfelt, Luxemburgin puistossa

Eero Järnefelt, Kaski

After thinking my idea in more depth I realised this painting quality was not actually what I was looking for my City Series to look like; I wanted the series to be film stills of the aftermath of le Belle Époque. What does this world look now, what have cities become till this date? 

We're living in an urban craddle - was it populated by 5 million people or 2 000 people, it's all the same. It's made by the people for the people, and it has been lived by the people, and it's not celebrated anymore. What city means to me is more of a dread and suffer, not a carefree place with golden ambititions - the ambititions has been shot down.

This is why I again looked into European cinema, such as Aki Kaurismäki, Béla Tarr, Andrei Tarkovsky and Vera Chytilová.

  

 

 

My plan is to shoot photographs of urban spaces that time has shaped them in being what they are now: I'm interested its psyche of time and space relationship, and the human living inside of the idea of a city. As with my Landscape Series, I want to use a person in these scenes, to create the feeling of a narrative in the photographs, to make them as film stills. This time the person needs to be wearing black and to be still; not see-through and light, but droopy and heavily layered. The person is to show the psyche behind the city, and the psyche behind the person, the human living in it.

This is why I am also interested in using my aesthetic reference as Francesca Woodman and her photography in the interior urban spaces.