Martin Parr traveled to the Tokyo subway photographing sleeping commuters, many of whom travel for hours every day. Photographed from above, the 24 colour images give the impression that one is standing on a busy commuter train looking down at those lucky enough to get a seat. I have chosen to research this photographer and this particular project of his because it relates well to both my own project idea and the exam title variation and similarity. With my idea to create images using buses as my transportation and location this project gave me some inspiration to think about different ways that i could include variation and similarity within my idea of taking photos from the bus, with this in mind I got the idea to get the variation in my project from photographing a variety of bus routes in different ares, and also at different times of the day, creating the similarity within the photos by always taking the photos from a bus, just like Martin Parr created all these photos on the subway. Whilst looking at Martin Parr’s work I also came across another of his projects which linked well to my project, ‘The Last Resort’, a series of images created between 1983 and 1985 at the seaside in New Brighton.
GB. England. New Brighton. From ‘The Last Resort’. 1983-85.
GB. England. New Brighton. From ‘The Last Resort’. 1983-85.
Between 1938 and 1941, Walker Evans took his camera underground, where he photographed subway riders in New York City. In order to discreetly capture these candid Subway Portraits, Evans came up with an undercover method of taking photographs. He concealed his 35-millimeter Contax camera by painting its shiny chrome parts black and hiding it under his topcoat, with only its lens peeking out between two buttons. He rigged its shutter to a cable release, whose chord snaked down his sleeve and into the palm of his hand, which he kept buried in his pocket. For extra assurance, he asked his friend and fellow photographer Helen Levitt to join him on his subway shoots, believing that his activities would be less noticeable if he was accompanied by someone. With these methods, Evans managed to capture people immersed in conversation, reading, or seemingly lost in their own thoughts and moods. His subjects’ faces display a range of emotions. He also succeeded in accomplishing a difficult challenge in making truly unposed portraits.
To plan out my shoots I have split up the map of all the bus routes into sections, I will then start by picking a route from each section and taking this bus to the end and back. I will also be starting by doing all my first shoots at a certain time, such as 14:00, once I have completed all shoots at this time I plan to do a second set of shoots at a different time such as 10:00. I plan to capture different perspectives by sitting at different levels on the buses, for example on the lower and upper levels of the double decker buses, by doing this I hope to create two different atmospheres in my photos, one as more of an invisible onlooker and the other as more a member of the crowd and community. My plan is to begin with these 10 routes the cover a wide area of the island, they are routes 12a, 22, 28, 7, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1a and 16.
Tom Wood’s All Zones Off Peak is the collection of a fifteen year photographic journey around Liverpool. The book features pictures resulting from spending eighteen years riding the buses of Liverpool during his 1978 to 1996 ‘bus odyssey’, the images were selected from 100,000 negatives. These works form a portrait of Liverpool and its people taken from the various bus routes that criss-cross the city. Wood spent 20 years travelling the buses during off-peak hours. In this time he shot 3,000 rolls of film, painstakingly refining his view of the city. The work has been published in two books: All Zones Off Peak (1998) and Bus Odyssey (2001). Described as ‘an epic of the everyday’, the photographs are dramatic and powerful documents of a city in motion. The book is composed of images where Wood photographs the world beyond the window as well as fellow travelers on the bus and waiting outside.
This image is taken from Tom Wood’s All Zones Off Peak, at first glance the images read like studies of the disenfranchised of the Northern inner cities. Wood’s bus journeys visually connect the regenerated areas of the city with more neglected, peripheral spaces: the declining high streets, areas of wasteland, cleared slums and abandoned houses of the inner-ring suburbs. These photographs are not about capturing specific moments but the endlessly repeated routines and minimal, wordless communities produced by bus journeys.
For the layout of ‘All zones off peak’ Wood uses a classic format for most the pages, using the same template of landscape pictures with a white border on all four sides, none of the images seem to be cropped and if they have been they have been cropped into the same landscape proportions as all the other images.
Rules of interaction and proximity are changing. It is this space that fascinates George Georgiou, this migration of people around this very open and public arena, but also a migration that has reached a target, the holy grail of the imagined Western urban dream. It is this new highly fragmented sense of community that his work investigates. London’s double decker buses are the perfect “vehicle or vessel” to explore and transverse a complex and vast city, to frame it. It has the advantage of allowing him two perspectives or levels of observation, the lower and upper decks. From this vantage point he can capture the complex phenomenon of urban stratification, how different people use the city through the day, how new layers of architecture, signage and street furniture add to what was already there. How different social, economic and ethnic groups appropriate, shape and adapt to the city. With buses he does not have full control, the random nature of where the bus stops and his position to what is in front of him is not to dissimilar to the encounters we have as we move through the city. He becomes, as the people he observes, part of the city system where thousands of individual paths cross randomly. A community of invisibility and but also voyeurism. But not only is the passer-by invisible, but he, as the photographer becomes a voyeur, become invisible to the outside, like the CCTV cameras in London that follow our every moves. Nonetheless his photography is not detached; he tries to capture and understand the emotional content of London’s everyday migrations, rhythms and rituals. Because he is part of this rhythm and community, it is also his distance and attachment, it is his community, his security, his home.
Originally the project began as Georgiou was thinking about London as a city of migration, the ‘last stop’not only for immigrants but also for people from across the UK. A city of dreams and possibilities; but as we all know, these dreams are not so easily realized. As the project evolved, he became more interested in trying to express the experience of the city, how we move through it, share it, coexist as a diverse group of peoples and cultures. The part that seems the most considered is the little soap operas we see everyday in public space, those encounters we witness and perceive as fictions. It’s a little like when we drive pass an accident on the highway: we glimpse the crashed car and imagine the rest. How we perceive is important element in the work. The design of the book is what holds together the whole concept of the work and relates to the actual experience of moving through a city. The essence of the project is that you might take the same route everyday but what you see, the ebb and flow on the street takes on a random nature. To capture this flow, the concertina layout of the book allows the feel of a bus trip, but more importantly it gives the viewer the opportunity to create their own journeys by spreading the book out and combining different images together. This moves the book away from an author-led linear narrative to one of multiple possibilities.
This photo series documents John Baldessari’s repeated attempts at throwing balls in the air, hoping they form a straight line. Baldessari invented and pursued this seemingly meaningless challenge. These photographs demonstrate Baldessari’s interest in exploring the structure and limits of games and language.
My initial thoughts for variation and similarity are in relation to the everyday mundane activities such as travel. For example a set of images of people traveling to work, by bus, car, walking, cycling and then another set of images of people traveling home after work, by bus, car walking, cycling. Or perhaps to use these forms of travel as a way to observe people, something that I have done for many years is getting the bus, for around 6 years the bus was my main mode of transport, using it to travel to and from school everyday and then to go out on the weekends with my friends and then later on as my transport to work on the weekends. Throughout these years I began to have an interest in observing the world outside and on the bus from a sort of distance, there is many things that you notice and observe whilst travelling on the bus without being noticed, in a way the bus can make you invisible. With there being 24 bus routes that cover the island my idea is to take as many possible routes on the bus for example 10 routes that go in different directions which would cover the majority of the island linking to the title similarity, and to include the title variation into the images my idea was to to pick 4 different times of the day for example 7:00, 11:00, 16:00 and 20:00 to get a variation of atmosphere with lighting and hopefully a variation of the activities that are going on outside the bus.
