Photography 1st draft

Both this essay and my own practical photography have been inspired by the work of Rut Blees Luxemburg, or more specifically the way in which she uses long exposure and the absence of people, to create a really eerie feeling when viewing her work. Additionally, her photographs take something that is very banal and mundane, such as a puddle or a road sign, or maybe even something you would never normally notice, and make it look really beautiful and seductive.

Before I was introduced to Rut Blees Luxemburg’s work, I had been interested in long exposure street photography at night; going out to photograph at night opened up a whole new side to taking a picture that I loved. I really liked that empty and vacant feeling of the night, the complete absence of people. In my opinion, long exposure opens up so many options for manipulating the photo in the way you want, before getting it to a computer screen.

The overall lack of human presence makes it quite difficult to construct narrative, which in turn opens up endless possibilities of questions for the viewer to think up; and no doubt every person who views the photo will have a different question to ask. Nevertheless, there is no real anchorage to photographs with no human involvement.

Long Exposure at night can create a real ‘filmic’ quality, especially when photography an urban area in the city. The street lights create this amazing orange glow, which drapes everything in the photo with an orange layer of light. When mixing this orange with the blues, greens, reds and whites of the shops and cars and so on, there becomes this amazingly clash of light that blend into one another, but at the same time almost gives the photo a grid-like quality, with the blocks of different colours. This produces an almost ‘fake’ or ‘untrue’ fairy tale land, because as well as all these layers of colour, you also have the added spectacle of light trails. I have seen and taken many photos that use light trials to create amazing effects, and they are you can get really inventive with them, although if you are taking a photo of an urban city scene, cars are your main worry, if you don’t want light trials. For example:

This is one of my photos taken at night on a main road, with a 30 second exposure. I originally took this photo because I saw a police car coming down the road with its lights on, so I wanted to see how it came out. I really liked the result for the reason that it’s different to all the other light in the photo, it’s hard to work out what it is. Although, the blue light that I was concentrating on getting was not the main attraction in this photo, because there is so many other things going on in the photo, such as the other yellow and red light trials from other cars, the bus going past in the background, but what’s more is the static surroundings of the clashes of light in the middle. I think the motionless surroundings, is what really creates that make-believe image. Another example of long-exposure that I have done, is making light trials, but actually using a torch to draw with the light, for example:

For this particular image, I didn’t try to draw an actual image of an object, it’s just a pattern. Nevertheless, I feel it’s a good example of what I mean. This image was also taken on a 30 second exposure, but with a flash, and also with no ambient light, this was taken in a field when it was pitch black.