Opening Quote: “photographs really are experience capture, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its

Statement of intent:

I’m exploring an area of street/urban night photography around the streets of jersey, and the villages occupying the island. I’m capturing images of these area’s at night with illuminate lighting to create an aesthetic image with dim lighting and areas with some brighter lighting and experiment with mixing and layering the images using photoshop and lightroom, whilst capturing a lot of people in the images and characters. Its more nostalgic than important to me because from the age of 11-15 I was always out on my bike with friends doing anything we could find that was fun or find interesting, for example trying new things like skating, finding abandoned areas around jersey because there isn’t much else you can do in jersey. But what connects this nostalgia to a night theme is that most of this would happen during winter which had shorter afternoons, and a majority of my fond memories are with fuzzy lamp lighting during the dark, and I think a lot of people can see the areas I’m going to photograph as nostalgic because most people would be out in these areas as a kid, finding what to do or having fun. And I want to represent that in a clearer way with higher quality but also contrast it with some images with docile areas to show the balance jersey has between the packed areas and more docile areas. I’m going to be mainly going to areas which have a good amount of lighting during the night but also areas which have people in to capture them in a moment or in motion. I’m going to present these images in a photobook as I like the layout it has. I’m going to have more of a wider perspective of my images through framing areas from a far away but not too close, and I’m going to be looking for a lot of shapes of street lights, apartment areas, people who present an aesthetic. These images will include a lot of architecture and well light, street areas during the night, with natural and artificial lighting. I don’t want to use too much forced lighting or and over use of lighting otherwise this wouldn’t look or feel like the aesthetic I’m aiming for.

Essay Question: What does Rut Blees Luxemburg reveal in her work?

“My photographs show something which is abandoned yet somehow invisible”.
Rut Blees Luxemburg

Introduction draft:

Night photography requires a lot more patients and placing of your camera. During the day there are infinite things to capture at every moment, but during the night everything slows down and areas you’ve never paid attention to start to appear under artificial lighting, allowing for more specific angles and shadows to appear, which form a more unique image than if it were under natural lighting. This is what Rut Blees Luxemburg explores in her work, in particularly the city of London where she has lived and made work throughout most of her career. In her long exposure, which in some cases last up to 10 minutes, she creates an aesthetic and skilfully made images. Furthermore, the feeling of a urban night photograph is interesting because the colours being used are very warm and outstanding. As she Blees Says, “I am not thinking about individual stories, but around the space as a site of ideas and immersion”, her work is created through what she comes across, and views her work space as a template for ideas which will come to her. she also brings her friend with her in case anything where to happen, but she explains that there is a beauty in night photography and the action of it allows for a different type of life to come out which you wouldn’t normally see during the day. In her book “my suicides” they reference in the beginning paragraph that, “they appear to identify that moment of communion where the search for subject if over.”, which refers to Blees’ work as revealing through the subject of the city, and how no other character or interference is made from the outside, rather a subject of the city. I agree with this statement because of how Blees does not include contextual images of characters like people in her images, and how she seems not to look for specific things to photograph, rather the things that she sees that is apart of the environment around her.

Luxemburg’s work relates closely to “the Sublime” in the aesthetic and how she perceives her world whilst capturing her images, where she connects to nature in a way where she is the observer of what happens during the night in London, this is supported by an interview made on her by Francis Marshall, where Blees states, “My second attempt to photograph London was in the early 2000s, and my mood had changed to ‘Liebeslied’”, which also initially attracted her to abandoned, broken areas of London . The context of the sublime is a philosophical view on the world in which there is a heightened awareness from the perspective of someone’s world view. This was introduced by Edmund Burk who overviewed the ideas of beauty, awareness, nature, and time in a book called ‘A philosophical enquiry into the origin of  our ideas on the sublime and beautiful”, which was a big movement into the idea of romanticism. Blees’ work connect to this idea of mystery, abandonment, even sadness, where behind all of that is an outstanding image, she even describes in an interview, her images as “one that’s alluring, open, glowing even… yet also ambiguously wet, slippery and dark.” . Which sends you through an array of negative yet intense emotion, but it also allows you to depict it into the context of how you view the image and see a different perspective on her images to reveal something hidden in what she creates.

Blees’ work aims towards the connection between beauty behind the abandonment and run down of areas. Exploring the nights of London, it allows Blees to see the empty carnage of what was left throughout the day, and even throughout the
centuries, she captures images of broken houses, cracked concrete floors, roads which fill with puddles, and beat down infrastructure, she can show a beauty behind it using angles and her camera, her work shows the process of having a second look. Susanne Kippenberger even says in her review of Blees, “Rut Blees Luxemburg finds beauty in the most mundane corners of the urban landscape”, showing Blees’ skill and relationship she has with this idea of “the Sublime”. Furthermore,  Her images create a nostalgic feel to them whilst also presenting a bit of mystery in a way that captures a person attention and for them to think about the image whilst appreciating it. This theme even progresses in other artists work, for example, Troy Piava, who expresses a lot of connection between abandoned areas within nature during the night, where he says “I love the surreal feeling of wondering through an abandoned subdivision, alone, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night. Your sense become heightened, and you feel the weight of time”. This type of work from a lot of photographers who explore this subject, find a lot of their work expressing a part of romanticism through the context of where they create their images and how they perceive image making.

Luxemburg’s My Suicides and other work relating to night urban photography uses a lot of contrast between lighting and uses a lot of warm colours to set the scene for the image, which create an affect of expressing emotion and meaning, closely linking to Romanticism which as a whole topic aims
towards nature, intensely expressed emotion and connection, which can all become revealed behind an image and its context. This is a lot of what Blees does within her image making during the night which creates personal inspiration because of the quality of the images but also the meaningful context behind the creation of the image, and that it can be presented through interpretation, because many images are a specifically set scene. Whilst at the same time it can relate to
others in a comforting way because of the crowded and rundown areas we interact with every day without taking notice because of its absence of beauty. For example in her book “My Suicides” it says, “The City becomes a hall of mirrors to reflext the duplicity or nobility of human nature”, which is relating to how the city mirrors humans innating ways of growing old and decaying. But moreover Blees states in an interview by Susanne Kippenberger, that the city is “full of endless possibilities”. Blees’ images present a sense of loneliness and decay, which contradicts how she creates a good image but allows for people to create their own interpretation of what the image means and represents, with a cue of the book title My Suicides, its as if her work is telling you something but makes you interpret in your own way with context of mysterious, run down, decayed areas , and the title of her books as a cue to how you should think about her images.

In conclusion Blees’ work presents a lot of mystery within her run-down images, whilst also showing how well she can transform abandoned dirty areas into a well-made composition of images. Although her work revolves around the same theme, each of her projects are presented in a way where you interpret her images differently with the same theme. By using the title My Suicides for example she prompts the audience to what to expect in her images, in this case lonely and abandoned areas with wider a point of view. I believe Blees’ practice in urban night photography is a way for her to show the template for the world we live in, in her case it is specifically London. She purposefully presents a view of stepping back in what you are looking at, and the world we live in today. Her images during the night shows the less chaotic context people live in day by day, and she presents a beauty within the images, as if she does if for the awareness for people and a way for restoration of an area to see it in a different light. The choice of contrast between warm and cold lighting whilst conveying mystery presents a deeper connection to the world around us because it makes you question your surroundings and take a closer look at areas you might not ever appreciate. This is an important factor in this area of work because there are limited things to photography and when you find an area or place it has a lot of history and context withheld in it, but is also a way of expressing emotion because colours can be much brighter and appreciated in these images especially when you link it to the context. Blees’ work personally relates to nostalgia in my context because memories are very vivid and in my case dark because a lot of the my more memorable experiences would be during the night around areas like this.

References: 

1: https://www.rca.ac.uk/more/staff/rut-blees-luxemburg/#:~:text=Rut’s%20work%20as%20an%20artist,from%20large%2Dscale%20photographic%20work.

2: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/interview-a-shot-in-the-dark-1287703.html

3: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/apr/23/rut-blees-luxemburg-best-shot-photography

4: https://photoworks.org.uk/interview-rut/

5: https://jeanmcneil.co.uk/blog/streets-%E2%80%93-dreams-and-reality-city-state

6:https://lightpaintingphotography.com/light-painting-artist/featured-artist-2/troy-paiva/