My goal for this project was to explore different neighborhood in Philadelphia and depict the differences in their atmosphere.
I was interested in representing each neighborhood in the way someone who visited there might remember it the next day, month, or year. I wanted to highlight striking features by making them bigger or more pronounced. I also wanted to explore collaging photographs from different perspectives. I was interested in the visualization of human memory and wanted to explore that in this project.
I tried to arrange the different neighborhood photos in different ways. For the Center City collage, I focused on line. I wanted to explore the overwhelming quality of this bustling, high rise area of Philadelphia. I realized that my own memories typically consist of the act of looking up at the skyscrapers while walking around and seeing them from different angles. I feel like city blocks get condensed in my mind into just the memorable, monolithic buildings. To communicate this, I actually took two buildings that sat on opposite sides of a city block and placed them right next to each other, abbreviating the whole city block down to those two beautiful buildings.
For the Gayborhood collage, I wanted to express the action of meandering down a quiet street, noticing the little details of each residence as you pass. To achieve this, I really played with proportion of images; making striking objects bigger and less interesting images smaller. I thought this would be a good way to examine memorable features and what sticks out in our minds. For the North Philadelphia collage, I was interested in the juxtaposition of abandoned buildings with nature. I mirrored an abandoned building with a large tree.
My inspiration came from visiting these different neighborhoods over the last couple months and realizing how distinctly different each section of the city feels. I wanted to investigate what elements added up to create such diverse energy in the different areas. As for the collage format, I was very inspired by David Hockney. His collage work is expressive, vivid, and varying. He lays out his work differently, some with more chaos and others with more order. I took inspiration from his use of multiple perspectives in one photograph and his layouts.
