City: Deconstructing Environmental Photographers Pt 2

The first phtoographer im looking at is a german photographer called Rut Blees Luxemburg. As i have already researched this artists for this project, taking my main inspiration for my own work from her, i am well farmiliar with her techniques and concepts. Her work mainly explores the urban landscape at night, just using the lights available(streetlights/city lights), and slow shutter speeds to create her images. Her earlier work looks at the city in a much larger context, showing the hidden areas that you would not usually see. She does this by distancing herself from the loction, and including the busy city scape around it. In her earlier work Liebeslied (which translates to "Lovesong" in english) She approaches the city in a more intimate way. The same techniques are used, but the subjects of the images are completly different, focusing on the small details such as puddles and reflections of buildings.

The second person i will be lookign at is Richard Wentworth, a british artist and sculptur.His photo series, Making do and getting by, vastly differes from Rut's work. Its main focus is on the everyday objects we see and use all of the time, but being put into a situation or being used for a purpose that they were not designed for. For example, a book being used to balance a table, or a boot being used as a door stop. The work starts to challenge our ideas of what these objects symbolise in their new positions. Unlike most of Rut's work, there is also a more defined anrrative within eash of Wentworth's images.



The final artist is another german born photographer, called Vera Lutter. Her work is again completly different to those of the previous two artists. Her images are created by using a room as a camera obscurer, and hanging large pieces of black and white phtoographic paper on the opposite wall and making large negatives of the view. These images are one off pieces, and are always negatives. This is the most litteral view of the city, as the images rely heavily on the room in which she is taking the picture from. Her work simplifies the city to just the buildings and surroundings. The extremly long exposure times needed to create these images mean that all life/movement in the image is lost, and all that is left is the defining buildings. Out of the 3 artists, i believe this work is the most honest and true representation of the city. The others have the luxury of being able to focus on elements of city life or the landscape. This work shows the city stripped of its people and shown at its rawest form, both in the sense that it is void of movement, and also that it is portrayed as a negative and void of colour.