Another collection of my recent artworks created using photographs of urban decay.
Step one in the creation process is always to do the legwork to find the weathered urban surfaces to photograph. Either by foot or bicycle. It's a kind of hunting but with very blinkered vision. I suspect I miss a lot of other interesting things by only looking for rust and cracked paintwork but the great thing is that it is all over the place! It's a boringly tidy town that doesn't have any.
I photograph them using my old Canon 5dMkII with a 50mm macro lens. Both are over 20 years old now but such good quality. My one dislike about this part is attracting attention. Typically I am in an urban area and people will stare at anything unusual such as a guy pointing his camera at a wall or roadsign. I wish I could just ignore all the "What's the hell's he doing?" comments but they always seem so loud! I am happy to explain/show what I am doing to anyone who's interested but mostly the comments are about me not to me. I should probably take a few prints along that show, for example, an old rusty car, the macro photo I took from it, and the finished artwork I created.
Boy Climbing the Abstract
I love climbing trees when I can find a reason to do so but I am waaay too old to be this reckless!
Rockpooling
For some reason the patterns I find on corrugated metal often remind me of coastal scenes. And it seems that I must have been feeling nostalgic recently as these first three images all feature young boys that could have been me fifty years ago!
Desolation Playground
The nature of trying to use weathered surfaces like this often leads to somewhat negative subjects due to the idea of age and things breaking down like this corroded metal. But then again, wasteground on the outskirts of town were often the best playgrounds!
One restriction with photographing these subjects is that they have to be reasonably flat because I want everything in focus and getting up close means a shallow depth of field. Therefore, curved surfaces generally do not work and I have to ignore all the interestingly rusty cans, drums and posts.
My aim with the photography is to take pictures of the weathered surface itself not the object it is covering. So, usually, it is not obvious what the object actually was. The one exception perhaps being corrugated metal where the stripes are obvious and it's always a fence (I know it's also used in roofing a lot but imagine the comments if I started clambering around up there trying to photograph it!). Here, all I want is a good abstract balanced composition. At this stage I am not thinking about how it could be used in a final artwork, although, sometimes it does clearly look like a particular landscape, for example.
Down the Crack
I started putting these images together before the recent earthquake in South-east Asia (which we felt at home over 1,000km away) but this image now seems sadly appropriate.
Rusty Rain
I read somewhere recently that the slackening of environmental regulations could actually lead to a re-emergence of an acid rain problem. Not the reason I made this image, which just looked like a curtain of falling rain, but again it does seem sadly appropriate.
Rusty Walker
The rain has stopped but the streets are still wet.
Pigeons, People and Street Dogs
To finish, a different kind of rain! I often re-use some of the same silhouettes in different images as you can see here with the woman second from the left being the same woman as two pictures earlier in the rusty rain.
