Who is Rut Blees Luxemburg?

Luxemburg is a German photographer, known for her night photography of urban/city environments. An artist I wish to feature in my essay about my upcoming photobook. Her photos that we will be talking about and showing appear to have a sort of run down, dark and ruined aesthetic of the industrialized world.

Career

As said already, her photos are of the streets of cities at night and urban areas. Most of them have a wet rainy look, combined with light being reflected off the puddles walls etc..

Visual

Each photo above is set in a dark alleyway/street etc. and has light either reflected or casted across walls, perhaps from the street lights or car lights. I think this because most of the lighting being casted has a hint of orange, which would be the colour of most streetlights in cities like these, combined with more warm orange-red lights likely from the break lights on cars. The areas are dirty and not maintained very well given the scratched and cracked walls and grounds and they all appear to have a sort of grainy and rough texture. The edges and corners on the buildings shown create lines, which result in shaping and creating sections of the image, even more so when colors are shown to be different on each side of corners/edges, it creates more variety in the image.

Conceptual

Some elements of “New Topographics” (Robert Adams) can be seen in these images too. When it shows edges and corners on buildings being perfectly straight, in contrast to natural structures such as hills and cliffs, which would have irregular shapes and forms. Perhaps Luxemburg is trying to convey a similar message that Adams tried to do.

Response

In my mock exam, I hope to respond to this work by creating my own images in reference to the work from Blees. I can take some night photography photos around town in the various alleyways, streets, roads etc.. I can take advantage of the cameras features by perhaps changing the ISO around and the Shutter speed to low, that way I can have lights from cars going past remain on the image as strips of light. Another thing I can do is in editing, bring out more of the colored lighting by adjusting the levels and the colour balancing in Lightroom.