Labels: dsdn144
Artist: Edgar Martins
Title: When Light Casts no Shadow
Date: 2008
"In reflecting on the complexity of the negotiations between estranged lives and de-territorialized worlds, one might wonder if the generic city is synonymous with the contemporary airport. Immured in temporality and suffering from a sense of historical discontinuity, the airport is the elementary expression of abstract space. It renders everyone weightless. It is the space of the uprooted."
Methods/ techniques
The images were produced at night, using the aprons’ floodlights, moonlight, long or double exposures of between twenty minutes to two hours.
Description
The artist's subject in this series are the airports on the Azores archipelago, unique in being amongst the very few black-tarred runways in the world. The airport runways are shot at night allowing for great contrast between the fluorescent painted signs and runway markings against a pitch black backdrop. One could hardly recognize them as photographs of the runways due to their incredibly abstract and minimalist nature.
I like how the long depth of field in the photos gives a sense of never-ending space even though the focus of the images are the details of the lines on the runway. In some instances, the runway even seems to merge with the night sky and the absence of any other objects to interrupt the lines further highlights the vast depth of field. I also feel that the entirely black night sky, being devoid of any moonlight and stars, looks very unnatural, and gives the airstrip an an unearthly appearance. The series looks like a collection of photographs of airstrip on a alien planet. The artist gives us a stunning view of a subject that we do not usually considered to be beautiful.
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Proposal
For this project "Light," I want to photograph places illuminated by light in the dead of the night. These lights on the streets act as "natural" spotlights on specific locations, and shooting it late in the night, without other light sources (eg. from cars) to distract, will provide an entirely black backdrop to these locations. This will help to create a stark and empty aesthetic, conveying a sense of quietness associated with the night.
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Evaluation (same as above)
The idea of taking apart different images and putting them together was pretty hard to do in terms of having a final composition that looks interesting and dynamic. I learnt the importance exploration of different methods, location, and subjects. For example, initially I wanted to mainly focus on the changing colour in the skies as a way to signifying the change in time, however, the result turned out quite generic and I really wanted something that was more interesting. Thus the subject was changed to people and vehicles, things that move and are different from each other.
This allowed me to take advantage of the process to bring together many details into single shot. This is especially highlighted by the set of photos of the bus stop, where, hopefully, each time someone looks at the composition will discover new details that were overlooked. Hence also helping to tied in my theme of missed moments in time.
Things to be improved on would be piecing together the different segments in the final compositions more naturally, so the entire image could look more cohesive. It was unfortunate that did not have the resources to develop all the individual images and physically tear and piece them together as John Clang did. While I tried to make the segment cuts less perfect and more random, mimicking how it would look if torn physically, the final result was not quite the same.
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Set 1.
Set 2.
Set 3.
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