Last weekend was Project X Presents… Xhibition in which everyones favourite multidisciplinary Birmingham arts collective took over Moseley Village for a day. I’ve been involved with PXP for a couple of years now documenting their weird and wonderful events but this is the first time I had been asked to contribute a piece of art.
I attempted to capture a portrait of Moseley through compositing over 300 different images in a Hockneyesque style. The collage method injects an element of time into the photograph, creating a truer portrait of the area than simply a static image.
In the end, due to circumstances beyond the control of the Project X organisers, the final print did not make it to the exhibition. It will be exhibited somewhere soon!
Click on the image above to see a large scale version integrated with Google Maps, it loops and you can zoom in to appreciate the level of detail in the final print. There’s also a gallery of pictures taken on the night itself here.
One of the wonderful things about working in the visual arts is the way that ideas can twist and shape themselves into new forms. It’s always fun to reevaluate old work with new eyes. Two years ago I created a series of photographs based loosely on Wim Wender’s astonishingly good Wings of Desire. It’s a series that I’m very proud of, imagining the angels of Berlin amongst the brutalism of Birmingham’s city centre.
Recently I’ve been getting interested in the possibilities of film as a medium and the logical first step, at least for me, was to revisit thesse shots as a short piece of cinema. A return, in some ways, to the source. This is my first piece of major film work and is a bit rough round the edges however I submitted it to the Flatpack Festival in Birmingham and it was accepted. It’ll be shown on the 15th March at 8:30 at Floodgate Kino as part of the Close Down event and I’m very much looking forward to watching it properly with an audience.
This version is a little old now, the film has been rejigged slightly for its showing at Flatpack, especially with the quality of the black and white in the footage. For a better quality viewing you’ll have to come on the night!
Yardley, in East Birmingham was where I grew up and a big part of my early childhood was walking down to the shopping centre at the Swan which straddles the Coventry Road. It’s one of those places that as a kid is huge but as an adult seems a strange parochial place. In recent years it’s become incredibly run down and it’s brutalist 60’s concrete architecture has crumbled and decayed to the point that there are only a handful of shops remaining.
Inevitably it’s scheduled for demolition this year to be replaced by a huge Tescos. Jenny Drew, town centre manager for Yardley put out a call to the Birmingham Flickr group and The Yardley Photographic Society to document the site before the redevelopment begins later in the year and so we all descended there yesterday.
The place had a lot of atmosphere, so much so I’m going to try and spin it out into a larger project, hopefully going back there to shoot some large format film. The place deserves a good send off.
my initial pictures are here , images from other Flickrers are going up on this tag
