The glorious outside

Continuing my collection of images of the glorious 'outside' which exists despite our inability or refusal to acknowledge it, I decided to drive my usual commute, rather than take the tube and train, thereby seeing the world like a film through my windscreen (as described by Paul Virilio in his essay 'Dromoscopy') but also to give myself a chance of stopping and taking photos at my leisure. The scenes of fields and hills have an Ansel Adams quality about them, and I decided to shoot some on black and white film.

These are the countryside, unspoilt fields, trees, hills and mountains, smells, sounds of nature, endless skies, which simply register as the 'background' while we commute from one small space to another.

1.       O’Neill, E.R. and Virilio, P. (1998) Dromoscopy, or The Ecstasy of Enormities. Wide Angle. Vol 20. No. 3. 

Between home and work

While working out ideas for an installation using photographs, I have decided to connect two 'Tower boxes', one representing home and one work, with a tunnel representing the commute, or our journey from one to the other.

Two things sprang to mind, the small, confined space in which we find ourselves travelling (from the confined space of home to the confined space of work), and also the wide open, fresh-smelling world outside of that confined space. the orld which we may glimpse through a window if we dare to look up.

Returning to the work of Michael Wolf I studied his series titled 'Tokyo Compression', consisting of photographs of commuters squeezed and pressed up against windows of packed subway carriages.

There are many photographs in the series, but I became particularly drawn to the ones which began to resemble paintings, or fashion photographs by Erwin Blumenfeld.

Wolf, M. (2010) Tokyo Compression

For the other aspect, the 'outside' I began taking photos of my own commute, part of which takes in the vast beauty of the Kent countryside. Taking photographs through the train window gave me high and sometimes voyeuristic vantage points. I also began to prefer the blurred softness of those photos where I used a slower shutter speed. Their minimalism excited me, and made me think of how they would sit together with the minimalism of my 'tower blocks'.

Structures

I was drawn to the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher due to the quite surreal and artificial quality of the buildings. Known for their documentation of water towers, I scoured through their work picking out structures which seem to me either amalgamations of factory and office, or places which give the appearance of having grown organically, with extra corners, roofs and windows sprouting haphazardly here and there.

Becher, B and H. From a selection online.