Hollywood Zen: Still life on CBS lot
I was working on the CBS lot in Studio City around sunset today. I had a digital camera with a few minutes and megabytes to kill, so I took some quickie snapshots of abandoned TV sets. Everything you see here is life-sized, but fake (not unlike my city). The […]
Mobile Linear City (1991) is a ‘city’ in storage. It comprises six housing units telescoped together into a semi-trailer and hauled by a tractor. The whole then looks like a conventional lorry. Once parked, the city can be pulled out to its full length. Clad in corrugated sheet, each house has […]
Eye-imagine: City without people
“The daguerreotypes of 1839 offered unparalleled detail and tonality, far exceeding that of paintings, lithographs and etchings. Its power lay in this detailed rendering, despite the fact that copies of the original could not be made, as was possible from a calotype ‘negative’ of the same period. High definition made the daguerreotype […]
Towards the Splendid City
Pablo Neruda, Nobel Lecture, December 13, 1971
Each of us made his way forward filled with this limitless solitude, with the green and white silence of trees and huge trailing plants and layers of soil laid down over centuries, among half-fallen tree trunks which suddenly appeared as fresh obstacles to bar our progress…
On […]
The Peruvian photographs of Martin Chambi convey “with unexpected intensity the structure and mood of a complex colonial society meeting the 20th century.”