Bus stops

When I first started this project I didn’t really know what I was aiming for, I was trying to do street photography since I actually never did it properly, but it seemed it was not quite enough. I looked up at some great photographers like Henry Cartier-Bresson, Gary Winogrand and Martin Parr, and then I looked back at my work... My photographs didn’t say anything special and they were quite different one from another. They didn’t seem to have a theme or common subject. So I stopped for a while and started looking back to my past projects and photographs. Although all of them were saying different things, they were all converging in three main themes: time, space and human culture. I realised then that these are the thing I think about subconsciously when I pick up my camera and go out.

So I gave it a rest and thought about it, asking myself this: what is a common thing people do on the street over and over again in an infinity loop which I can photograph to portray my ideas?

The answer was quite simple, the bus stops. The waiting, the queuing, the looking at the time to see when the next bus comes, the people and cars passing by, the routine of all the things you do while at a bus stop would simply engulf the ideas I want  to represent. I chose the Centrelink bus stops for the project, because of the loop the bus takes every 10 minutes between Broadmarsh and Victoria coach stations over and over again. Another thing that made me take this decision is the magical number 10. The number 10 is regarded as the most perfect of numbers, because it contains the unit that did it all, and the zero, symbol of the matter and the chaos, of which all came out. It then includes in its figure the created and the non-created, the beginning and the end, the power and the force, the life and the nothing. So I used this number as a reference when taking my photographs, at first I wanted to do a whole 10 minute exposure but I ran into some technical problems, I didn’t have the money to buy the required equipment in order to do this, so I opted for something similar. Every one minute for ten minutes I took an exposure in every bus stop after that I over layered the exposures one on top of the other for each of the stops I went to, to combine them in the final image that would represent the bus stop and what s happening within those 10 minutes.

Light Anomalies or Another Individuality

This one here continues the idea the of the last project, but from a different perspective. In a way  it resembles it, but there is a major difference between them. If in the first one I tried myself to communicate to the viewer the strong emotions the abandoned and the derilict imprinted upon me, in this project I left somebody else to communicate what they felt. In order to show and to express what they felt, I supplied them with a set of glowsticks and LED's from which they chose what they thought would work better with their inner selves. They painted, they carved, and the sculptured "their selves" without realising it. It was looking like they were performing a sort of ritual known only by them. A ritual that took no longer than 8 to 16 seconds. The click of the shutter triggered the event... it looked mesmerizing to say the least... The second click of the shutter would imprint the act on my camera sensor, embedding it into an photograph of their past feelings discarded in a pattern of light. I felt mroe like an observer then a photographer, while recording their performance in a single image.
I can't decide how to name the project, mainly because way too many of the titles I came up with fitted in, if viewed from different perspectives... But in the end, after a little bit of strugle, I came up with two.  I will leave my viewers to decide which one suits it more (mainly because I don't want my viewers to be passive, but to interact with my work).

( As reference for the project, I looked up the work of the modernist sculptors Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, as well as the movie Stalker, which I recomend everyone should see, by Andrei Tarkowsky)

The "other" natural

With this project, I tried to capure the ruins of a industrial civilization through another beings' eyes, by exploring the barrier I never thought to be so fragile between artificial and natural. It's incredible to be witness of the way the machines and objects looked so natural with the ruthless mark of time hanging over them...  transforming... and coming to life in a way I never encountered. As if the time "they" encountered was different from how we do. Both us and them are passangers in the same world, yet trapped in different dimensions, where the time flow is different...

(most of them have been shot at 6400 and 12800 iso)

The last of the few or the few of the many...

This post should have got up on the blog at least one month ago... but meh... Hopefully I will do more uploads with my work this week, I quite have a lot to post...

I would like to dedicate this post to the last remaining wisent in Europe. I really don't like the way this sounds... and not necessarily because it sounds like a cliché, but mostly because it makes it obvious that they are becoming extinct. I will start with a short summary about them of the things I read on some websites about wisent (ex: wikipedia, wikimapia etc).


The wisent, also known as the European bison  it is one of the heaviest surviving land animal in Europe, a typical wisent can measure up to 2.2 metres tall and 3 metres long, with a weight that can excede 1 ton. There were different types of wisent inhabiting Europe, depending on the region they were found in (ex: Caucasus Wisent).They were once hunted to extinction during the 1920s and have since been reintroduced from captivity into some countries from Eastern Europe. The wisent population took a slow but steady downfall from the 8th century especially in the western part of Europe, becoming extinct in Gaul and by the 12th century  they were no signs of them to be found both in Sweden or southern England. The last of the species that survived in Western Europe was last tracked to be in the Ardennes and the Vosges in the 15th century. Although they were still slowly losing their numbers, the wisent survived in Eastern Europe. In the 20th century the last wild wisent in Poland was killed was in 1919, while in 1927 the last wild wisent in the world was killed by poachers in the western Caucasus. By the end of that year only 50 remained, all held in captivity.


Starting with the year 1951, wisent have been reintroduced into the wild. This was made possible by the reproduction program they went through in the zoos and the natural reserves. Their numbers slowly rose up despite they are still on the brink of exctinction due to their vulnerabilty to diseases. At the very moment less than 3000 specimens are still alive in the world, most of them being in national parks in Poland, Belarus, Romania, Ukraine and Russia.


In Romania, they can be found roaming freely in Neamt and Hateg (there might be another one but I am not sure). 

The reserve I went to is 3km away from Hateg. The road leading from the main road to the reserve was through the Silvut Forest, the forest where the first european wisent (breed from different ancestors) appeared in Romania.


Before I headed for the Silvut Hateg-Reserve I researched and found on some websites that there are still 7 wisent alive there, but it seems that those sites haven't been updated for ages now.... Because when I got there, there were only 4. "Three females and one male... that's all we got left." the forestman told me. "We had seven a couple years ago... but they are quite frail despite their size, they are very vulnerable to diseases!" it's what he replied to my question about the missing three. I was not only saddened but frustrated at the same time... and not because I knew these were some of the last ones still roaming the earth, but because of the state the reserve was in. "We once had raindeer, wildboars, bears, black goats and other species that were free in the wild, but now they are gone... It seems there are more important things out there now, than natural reserves or wildlife... School busses used to come every weekend years ago.... Now we are happy if we can still get a couple of visitors around from time to time, every couple of months..." I can clearly remember the bitter taste I had that day. From what it looked and from what I've seen. The forestman and his wife were the only ones taking care of the whole 50 acres reserve and of the wisent. I asked  him "How hard is it to take care of them?", he replied "It is hard work.." while pointing at pen of where the wisent were kept sometime during the day or at night, "I started demolishing the concrete wall of the pen, to replace it with wood, so that small children can see better through.", indeed trying to look through the concrete wall was almost impossible, to say nothing about the industrial communist look it had...  

But yet again who cares about this all...? Wait... No... Let me rephrase that... There are more "important" things to care about than this... There are way "better", "necessary" and "life concerning" issues to take care of than our natural and national heritage and values... Which are left to rot and decay in the fight for power, while we spectate the cyrcus that happens in front of us... I try to shout! But I can't hear my own voice... Others try to shout aswell! I see them and they see me... But it's useless we are way too few in the crowd shouting, in order to cover the screeching rattle of the cyrcus freaks with just our very own voices... So we wait... And hope that the show will soon come to an end...




For good...

a Monochromatic bEing...

It's been a while now since my last post here... It has been like... let's see.. December, January, February. Three whole months with nothing new happening on the blog... But meh... In fact many things happened. Way too many, in such a short period of time.


So what currently runs through my mind, sounds like this:


There are no photographs without stories, as there are no humans without feelings. For me this phrase strongly states one thing.  That there is not even the smallest difference between all these words. These four words, stand up strong one for each other, they can't be broken appart by anything, be it man or nature. Each one of us has his own story, his own feelings, even his own photographs... all these put together makes us what we are. It sounds simple enough, but the more you think of it, the more you drown in your own thoughts thinking about it... and I ended with one word that merged these four words into one, it's so simple, yet so amazing... The word I found... is:


Color.


How can you define color? You can see it, you can touch it, you can describe it, but that's pretty much it. Color just... exists. You can alter it, turn it or mix it around, but it will still remain a color. You won't be able to deny its existance nor the way it influences you, no matter how hard you try. Did you notice that when we think of a color, we inanitely think of a correspondent of it? For example when we think of the color blue, we will associate it with the sky and the sea, or the color red for blood and tomato. But colors don't have to be as straight forward as the theory of the signifier and signified written by one of the fathers of semiology, Ferdinand de Saussure. It can also be a feeling... For example blue can mean calm, yellow can be fear and red can mean love, etc.


I hope this post will challange the viewer's mind, raising questions about the feelings these monochrome photographs dictate inside them...


Enjoy


PS: The photographs are taken with a Zenit 12xp with two lenses: a 58mm f:2 and a 135mm f:2.8.

 

Birds under an overcast sky

In this post I uploaded some bird pictures  I took last Saturday in Attenborough. The weather wasn't all that bright that day, so most of the photos where taken  under a heavy and dull looking sky, which gave me the same kind of lighting.

Cloudy Sunsets

I guess any photographer has at least a couple shots of sunsets and clouds in his work. But photographing just clouds or just sunsets can get pretty dull and boring at a point. So what I tried to do here, was to merge both subject matters into a bigger more complex one. In order to create something more unique looking I emphasized the sky more than the land, leaving it just as a shadowy silhouette in the background.


[: Note :] Looking through the images again and again, I realized that there is a weird resemblance between  them and how girls use make up in order to point out some of their best features... like lips, eyes or cheeks.