Reserch - Places

Yves Marchand

Romain Meffre

Photography

The ruins of Detroit

At the beginning of the 20th Century, the city of Detroit

developed rapidly thanks to the automobile industry.

Until the 50's, its population rose to almost 2 million people.

Detroit was the 4th most important city in the United States.

It was the dazzling symbol of the American Dream City with

its monumental skyscrapers and fancy neighborhoods.

Increasing segregation and deindustrialization caused violent riots in 1967.

The white middle-class exodus from the city accelerated and the suburbs grew.

Firms and factories began to close or move to lower-wage states.

Slowly, but inexorably downtown high-rise buildings emptied.

Since the 50's, "Motor City" lost more than half of its population.

Nowadays, its splendid decaying monuments are, no less than the Pyramids of Egypt,

the Coliseum of Rome, or the Acropolis in Athens, remnants of the passing of a great civilization.

Olaf Otto Becker

Robert Polidori Chernobyl

Born in 1951 in Montreal, Robert Polidori is considered one of the world’s leading architectural photographers. Transcending the limits of pure architectural photography, Polidori’s images record a visual citation of both past and present, an extraordinary invocation of history and modernity within the confines of a single frame. Through the photograph’s ability to mummify the present moment, Polidori’s work eschews nostalgia in favor of the poignancy of absolute reality. Polidori is the author of eight books including Versailles (Place des Victoires 1999), Havana (Steidl 2001), Metropolis (Metropolis 2004), and most recently After the Flood (Steidl 2006). A new exhibition of his work entitled After the Flood featuring photographs taken in the wake of Hurricane Katrina will be on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 19 September through 10 December 2006.

Henk van Rensbergen

Today, the pyramids of the industrial revolution just uselessly stand in the way, they're a scar in the landscape.
The deafening noises have been replaced by silence, but if you listen carefully they will tell you their story.

Abandoned hospitals where you can still smell the anxiety of the ill,
where you can hear the coughing of the TBC infected
and where once doctors and nurses walked through the shiny corridors.

A 100 years old hotel, standing proudly at the waterfront, arrogantly overlooking the beach
and fiercely withstanding all the storms of the past century, a decayed symbol of wealth for the rich.

Why are abandoned places so attractive ?

Carey Primeau's

For as long as I can remember, I could sit and stare at the sights my two eyes were given the gift to see. I have always been a very visual person, often preferring non verbal communication over the more complicated vocal ones. I always felt the way I saw things was a bit skewed from others, or maybe I was just more in tune with my surroundings. Either way, photography soon became an outlet for me to communicate ideas that were often to difficult for me to put in words.

My fine art background from the University of Illinois has provided me with a precisely tuned perspective on the art of photography no matter what I shoot or who I shoot it for. Photography is an art that I continually reach for perfection with and when I started taking it seriously is when I felt I finally gained a voice.

Andrew Brooks - Hidden Manchester

Andrew Brooks is a photographer, a digital artist and film maker living and working in Manchester, northwest England.

His visual palette draws its inspirations from analogue reality, the contemporary urban surroundings in which he lives and works or the natural world that he escapes into.

“The crucial element to my work is atmosphere…. No matter how much digital application is going on, the atmosphere and feel of a picture is always the most important thing.”

Andrew’s creative process often results in capturing hundreds of images to create a complete work. Then, a meticulously developed sequence of cut, paste and rebuilding, moulding a new scene from his own vividly re-imagined viewpoint that is consistent, yet also a parallel with that of the perceived reality it represents.

The images that emerge depict starkly beautiful urban scenes, empty but for the hollowed-out shells of buildings; cities suspended in the stars, imagined urban environments and serene pastoral scenes of the British countryside, seemingly real and at the same time untruthful in their vivid beauty.

Here are some of his images . . .