Tag: photography

Lee Jeffries – Manchester Photographer

Manchester’s Lee Jeffries has just won Digital Camera Magazine’s photographer of the year for a picture he took of a homeless man on the city’s streets. The judges said of the image:

Lee’s remarkable image is simultaneously moving and troubling. By peeling away the superficial veneer of modern British society, it forces the viewer to evaluate their own position in the social hierarchy of the age and confront some uncomfortable truths.

It is a gritty, poetic image which tells a long and painful story. You can see it below (bottom row, fourth from the left) as part of Lee’s flickr gallery. Click through to that gallery and view the series as a full screen slideshow to really appreciate the beauty in the detail.

Lee Jeffries Flickr gallery

Photographic Memory

So many of our memories are increasingly supported by photographic images. They jog , augment, and sometimes supplant the memory as it fades from mind. In some photographs we can even doubt that it’s actually ‘us’ represented by the image. ‘That can’t be me’ we say as we move our eyes between the photograph and the mirror. It seems that the photographer Irina Werning had such an experience in mind when she set about documenting the connections between memory, time and change in her series Back to the Future. Clever and beautful.

Diego 1970-2011 Buenos Aires

Found Images

You don’t need a video camera to make films: simply use one of the huge number (estimates range from 2 – 4 million in the UK) of CCTV cameras.

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That film was made by hijacking CCTV cameras. A group of young kids bought some relatively cheap and small devices which can sniff out signals broadcast by wireless CCTV networks. Using the surveillance images captured, the kids then created their own. Not only is it a great way of making free videos, it’s also a comment on the ubiquitous surveillance which is now an invisible part of all our lives. Have a look at MediaShed for more information on the form and how to make it.

Nor do you need a camera to make photographic images. Google street view has, since 2007, photographed street views of cities and urban areas in over 30 countries and is still crawling around streets taking high definition images in places as far apart as Israel, Lativa and Peru. Those images are now being used by photographers to produce landscape photographs such as this from Aaron Hobson:

If you want to follow up how Google street view has been the focus for a number of art projects, this article from Wired is a good place to start.