The Contemporary Urban Environment

Beginning with Rut Blees- Luxemburg, we see a very unique interpretation of the urban environment. Rut Blees focuses on the cityscape using a 5X4 camera, which is not what one would expect as your camera of choice for an urban environment project, again not what you would expect for urban photography she uses long exposure times most of which are around 10 minutes long. She uses this camera and exposure in order to draw on the fullest of the uncontrolled ambient lighting in the area, street lamps, windows revealing lights and so forth.

She tries to capture a sense of a world we do not see, a world behind our world almost, hence her strange camera and exposure choices for this body of work. There are no people present in this image, or rather all of her images in this work, at least not clearly. But she ensures that is some kind of evidence of a human presence here, for instance the chair and the drink inside the red container. The way this is lit however and how the colours are all brought out makes it an incredibly vivid and almost playful, wonderland approach to this particular scene, it is as though through the long exposure to draw out the colours and textures of this scene, the landscape and objects themselves are given life on their own.

Her use of water in this particular piece makes a perfect metaphor for what she creates with her work, this idea of the mirror world, the human world we have made but suspended in almost a form of spiritual limbo.
Rut Blees talks a lot about the relations we have with water, particularly rivers. She references Friedrich Holderlin in an interview speaking about how the river is this ever moving entity that connects places and brings them to the sea, but through its reflection it also connects us to the sky, bringing these two separate elements together. Holderlin sees this relation close to a form of relation with God, and Rut Blees has taken this idea to joining her worlds with our worlds.

This series was all taken in Swansea, UK, though you would not be able to significantly identify it as a particular location from these images, Swansea is in actual fact the very opposite at a glance of this exciting wonderland styling in Rut Bless' images. Typical of many places in Britain it used to be an industrial area, mostly steel works, much of which was destroyed in World War II and then rebuilt without industry after, and so there is a sense of loss of life in the, all built with 50s style flat pack buildings and tower flats one could at glance view it as a depressing place almost.

Certain earlier pieces of her work like DVLA show a more recognisable Swansea with this building, it seems like an incredibly overbearing presence, there is only the smallest amount visible at the bottom of the frame visible of the rest of the city.
It is still presented to us in a way it would not normally be viewed as it is given it's darted strip of light from the office lights and the grey lines of it's windows really cut through these strips. The tones however are still very grey, and it is quite a dark image.
She says that as her work continued she developed the motto, "To get out, go in deeper" and when we compare DVLA to Towering Inferno we can see this journey of discovering her parallel world and the motto of exploring deeper and closer apply through the series.

 We get this idea of immersion and understanding through the work, as we see parts of Swansea, but not in the way you would typically expect, as we see the DVLA building, we see a block of flats, or a car park, but we don't see the locations, we see an understanding of the area, its almost a way of hinting about the people and life in the area, but in a much subtler way, almost in a spiritual way.

This idea of capturing not what you see as such, but more what you experience, or what you feel is a concept that drives many artists, particularly Vera Lutter, who began really as a sculptor and conceptual artist in Munich before moving to New York.
She works with the camera obscura, creating direct imprints on paper negatives.
She rejected the idea of the lens, the negative and the print of standard photography, as she wanted to record her feelings and experience directly.
She explains it as beginning with her first apartment in New York and being fascinated by the lights, sounds and busyness of the streets, and she wanted to create a process of viewing it with her experience, as the apartment was central of her experience, she wanted to transform it into a container for this art piece, making her window where she watched the city her lens, the room she experienced it became the container and she replaced her body that felt the experience with the photographic paper.
This began her use of the camera obscura and the incredible exposure times she took these with.

Where Rut Blees uses the 5X4 format with exposures ranging around 10-15 minutes in order to visualise this spirit world, or the imprint life and experience leaves on a location, Vera Lutter takes her experience in raw form, using the giant paper negatives and skipping printing negatives into a straight, view point to viewer piece.
The majority of her work takes to looking at places of industrialisation, looking at the current and the old, the shifting changes between that which man uses to push for industrial fabrication and that which is abandoned until it takes a life of its own. From this idea of natural and man made progress and constructs she moved to another aspect of cities, which is the transportation side, how do these cultures and peoples that inhabit cities in such vast quantities get there? What of the product of their culture they bring with them? Which began her work looking at the constructs we make for this vast shift from place to place.

Again through out her work she utilises the camera obscura for this 'raw form image'. The direct transfer of experience.
We can compare and relate the intentions of both Rut Blees and Vera Lutter in their journey of capturing not what we see but what we feel.
As experience and emotions are not tangible things, but the two struggle to record it, to convey it and show it without it losing it's meaning, are it is not something quite there as such but it is something recognisable.

The methodology of the two differs in camera choice and stylistic approach but they are two of the same type of artist in that, there are those that struggle to mould and shape what they see and control it to convey what they wish, and then there are those that will not alter, that will wait, observe and try to understand the meaning behind what they see, until they find a way of showing that hidden image behind the every day image. With both Vera Lutter and Rut Blees they do not alter their scene in any way, they keep it as they see with their eyes, but then find a way to show it to us as something else, the experience of the event and not the construct of the event.

We have a similar meaning to Richard Wentworth's work with the photograph. He is technically not a photographer, he is a sculptor, he describes his relationship to the camera as a tool for bringing small portable versions of the event after it has occurred. Unlike Vera Lutter of Rut Blees, he does not actively make any compositional choices as such, if any are made it is merely for producing a form of contextual reference for the scene at hand.

Richard Wentworth's series, Making do and Getting By has a humbleness to it, it is a series where many small simple close ups are shown of objects out of their contextual use. There is a sense of 'botch jobs' to them but not poverty, the cup used to prop open the window, the boot as a door stop. Similar to much of Rut Blees' work we get a sense of playfulness about it, as we are so used to reading the items in these images in a completely different context, we take for granted that a cup is for drinking, or even more specific, a white ceramic cup is used for the drinking of tea or coffee, where one would take time and leisure to sit and enjoy the drink, the style of cup could even go so far as suggesting it was part of a set, and therefore we should see it in a scene where there is more than one person enjoying this drink. It however taken completely out of context and subverted, bizarrely into propping the window open for ventilation, not a brick or a even a tool that would typically be the temporary replacement, but a tea cup.

The same applies to the boot and the door, the boot is holding the door open, but we would expect to see someone wearing that boot using their foot to wedge the door open. As your mind comes with it's own perception, and preset values of contextual reference, you can almost construct character and narrative for this boot imaging that it chooses to hold the door open, it transcends being a soul less base object and gains this whimsical character to it.

Wentworth does the same with a whole assortment of items across London, like Rut Blees finding those moments when an ordinary location is seen for the spiritual character and life that resides there, or Vera Lutter capturing these whole experiences and motions, they all differ in methodology but they all strive to create not a construct as such, not a linear narrative, but to capture not that which our eyes would ordinarily see but what exists behind that.