Seminar Five - "The Contemporary urban Environment" Deconstructing Environmental Photographers

                                         Rut Blees Luxemburg

16th floor of a Tower block in London
Rut Blees Luxemburg

Rut Blees Luxemborg

Many of Rut Blees images have been shot at night, some from afar some up close. 

after some research I became more familiarised with the images that she makes as they album covers for CD's.

Many of her images are night shots of the city, she only uses available light from street lights, light pollution from other buildings or sources, by only using this style of lighting she has to use a long exposure to obtain detail and the correct exposure. the image on the left was shot from the 16th Floor of an opposing tower block in London, back then she said
"The tower block in the picture is in the east end of London, off City Road. I took it from a balcony on the 16th floor of another building. It was in 1995, I think, when I was doing my MA in London and council blocks such as this were still very open. You could just walk in and take a lift upstairs; you couldn't do that now". 'Quote from the Guardian Website Thursday 23 April 2009'
I find her work inspiring as you wouldn't normally look at an tower block in the same way, many people see them every day and think nothing off it.
This iamge was used on the cover of a band called 'The Streets' she also shot an image that was used on the cover of 'Bloc Party's' album 'A Weekend in the City' 

When one compares these the other Two artists below, there are a few similarities one main one is that no other lighting sources are used, just the ambient lighting that is available and a long exposure time to make full use of the little light that is available.

Rut Blees Luxemburg, 'Folly' 2003

This is image is of a minimalistic style has no humans or any human interaction, its shot from a high view point and with the fluorescent light thats used you can see the camera, or the cameras shadow on the flooded stair case platform, the eroding, rusting stair case and railings could suggest a metaphor of many things in life, that over time things, objects even people become older, tired, worn out an have served their purpose and are left to decay over time sometimes out of sight sometimes in full view.

Richard Wentworth

Richard Wentworth

Is a sculpter and a Photographer
This is visible in some of his images that his is a sculptor as he photographs objects that are similar to that of many sculptures, they are constructed images, some by himself and some if not many by other people such as the bottle that has been placed in between a tree and a support rod for the tree.
The view point he has shot the image at, makes the viewer look down on the object, the discarded bottle is rubbish that no one wants anymore, its served its purpose and has no other use to us. When you compare that to the image below, its very similar in that the jacket has been discarded and has no other use, or has been forgotten about and has been left.

They look like they are a quick snap photograph, by that I mean its as if he was just passing and noticed the jacket on the fence and took a quick snap of it.
The colour palette is very limited, in that there are Two main colours the greens that are on the grass and the fence then the brown for the jacket.
There is almost a narrative to this, one could make up a story of a perhaps older gentleman, who on a warm sunny day took of his Cardigan and placed it upon a fence, whilst playing with Grandchildren then just forgot about it.
Again this object could be a Metaphor, for the forgotten things we have or had in life and have left behind as we progress through life's highway.

Vera Lutter, Zeppelin Friedrichshafen, I: August 10–13,
1999, unique silver gelatin print, 55×81”.

Vera Lutter

Camera Obscura

"Vera Lutter uses the most elemental means of photography to render the world she depicts – and photography itself – unfamiliar and new. The tool is the camera obscura (literally, “dark room”), the optical principle of which holds when light passes through a small aperture into a darkened chamber and an inverted image will appear on the wall opposite the hole. Lutter hangs black-and-white photographic paper on the wall to capture the image. The resulting pictures are one-of-a-kind paper negatives. As such, the tones on the paper are reversed – the daytime sky appears black, dark buildings appear white – and the image itself is inverted and upside-down (although Lutter displays the pictures oriented with sky at top). Because of the small aperture necessary to keep the image in focus, her exposures are necessarily long, from an hour or two to several days or even weeks."  


The above quote was taken from www.mocp.org this describes how she uses the primitive form of photography which was first used by painters around the 14th Century. This is a different style of photography from that of the other artists mentioned above.
The amount of detail obtained using this process is rather impressive, because of the small aperture that was used, resulting in long exposure times, also comes greater detail from the foreground right through to the background.

From the images I have seen created by her, they are of cityscapes, building sites within the city but one thing that I have noticed is that her use of camera angle and view point, they are all very similar, there is slight differences in each and every shot but overall they are shot from the same height and focal lengths are almost the same implying that only one lens was used.
This means that she carefully chose each location to set up her Camera Obscura so that it was possible to create each image with similarities to the previous.










333 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago,
 IL, October 16, 2001