For the second half of the environment project, the cityscape, we had to take a Pastiche of one of 3 images provided to us: “Albuquerque, New Mexico” by Lee Friedlander; “Paris After Dark, No 27” by Brassai; and “Bukseo Dong, Pyongyang, North Korea” by Thomas Struth.
Brassai
Lee Friedlander
Thomas Struth
We also had to make a series, of at least 3 images of a concept of our choosing but of something related to the city, it’s people or the atmosphere around it.
I had quite a lot of trouble thinking of a concept for it. To start with I thought of concepts I could apply in London but could not think of anything original. Some people form our course would tell me their idea and I would think of something similar and how I could do it but wanting to be original decided against them. Then I heard we could get camera equipment over Christmas and started thinking of ideas that I could do back in Mallorca, where I am from and live when not at University. I managed to secure a Bronica SQ-B with the standard lens and an extra 90mm lens, a tripod and a light meter.
I decided to do Brassai’s image as my pastiche after I my camera equipment had been confirmed for the holidays as I thought that Palma would be the perfect place to take it as the old part of the city has many streets with the paving from years ago still in place, with the same style of lamps, walls and windows. When I got back to Mallorca for our three week Christmas holiday I scouted the city out for my pastiche and found several alleyways that I could use for my pastiche, but also developed a few concepts: the difference between the new parts and old sides of the city, as Palma’s arquitecture is a mix between the old and new and sometimes the change is quite drastic but sometimes it is barely noticeable and I wanted to put these on camera; around Palma there are dozens of churches, but most of them cannot be seen unless you go down several back alleys and streets and are mostly hidden, I found this to be and interesting idea but one that I could not think how to shoot to represent this; my final idea, and the one I decided to shoot, was to shoot the Plaza España and Plaza Mayor of the city, to squares that are present in every city and some towns of Spain, places of gathering, markets and recreation. They are not identical in every place but have the same name and same concept behind them. The Plaza Mayor is translated as Major Square and is the more important of the two and Plaza España is translated as Square of Spain or Spain’s Square. They are two symbols of Spanish cities and arquitecture.
I shot them both at night with long exposures. Although I took pictures of both squares, using a roll of film each, when I got back to Rochester and processed the rolls of medium format film the film I used to shoot the Plaza España came out distorted, overlapped and blurred and was unusable. In the end I took 3 images I took from Plaza Mayor and printed them out, I had to colour correct them a lot as there are Christmas lights and the light coming from the lamps around the square are very yellow.
Then, from the locations I scouted for my pastiche, I chose one looking at the images taken from my iphone and comparing them to Brassai’s image on the Internet. I then went back and shot the location I had chosen. It wasn’t as easy as I thought as people kept on walking up and down the street but got it done and am quite pleased with the outcome.
