For my first contextual study for my personal study project, I had a look at an interview between Rut Blees Luxemburg and David Campany from his book So present, so invisible. I read through the interview and selected key quotes that I thought were interesting and chose one of Luxemburg’s photographs and analysed it. I used the quotes from the interview to look deeper into the context and concept of the image.

Quotes selected from Luxemburg’s interview with David Campany:

This image’s colour palette is limited to yellows, oranges and greens, giving it an urban and surreal aesthetic. The image also makes use of a strong contrast between the dark blacks and browns and the brighter yellows and oranges, further amplifying the themes of the surreal and urban in a beautiful yet simultaneously disturbing. These tones and colours are due to how Luxemburg used a very low shutter speed in the evening/night, with a tripod. The lines and shapes in this image are mainly very straight, regular and vivid, further removing the subject from nature and giving it a somewhat fixed, almost surreal aesthetic.

For context as to why Luxemburg creates her images this way, she explains that ‘the camera allows what is called a transformation. Something other than what you can see during your mundane, everyday experience of the city can emerge.’ Her use of a long shutter ‘transforms’ the image, making what would be otherwise be a much darker, less detailed image, a detailed, vivid and almost surreal feel. This seems to also transform the city shown into something completely different to what the inhabitants would typically see in their day to day lives, into something unknown or unfamiliar. I think Luxemburg does this to not only give her images an artistic flair, it could also be use to show the artificiality of a city landscape.

Luxemburg describes walking around the city, the way she finds the places she photographs, to ‘induce a certain state of mind. It’s not dreamlike, but it is almost meditative’, solidifying the idea that what she photographs is very much real and could be realistically considered both beautiful and perhaps dangerous, while the use of a long shutter speed does affect the emotions differently to what would be seen without it. The idea of walking also gives a sense of danger and wonder, perhaps suggesting the dangers of living in a large city and how that affects its inhabitant’s lives.

‘It’s not so much a fascination with photography, but a fascination with the possibilities of the large format camera and the long exposure which allows me to let chance enter the work.’. This idea of chance may very well link with how Luxemburg’s images give off a surreal aesthetic, by letting the camera and city decide how the picture will look, instead of the artist. The control Luxemburg has over her images is much smaller in comparison to a still-life/object image in a studio, seemingly creating conflict between the idea of the subject matter being controlled, while the artist capturing this is not in control of that image. To me, this is a lot of the reason as to why Luxemburg’s images look the way they do, and I think that she knew this very well when taking her images.