Archive for December 2008
Whose city is it anyway?
Many of us take this city for granted, we travel from point to point, in and out — the issue for us it seem is not about if we can but if we want to. For us, the public transport is convenient, we have the money to gain access to most places and we fit in easily (i.e. no funny stares from others).
Not my mother or my aunts it seems. They stick to direct bus routes, enduring longer journeys because the drill of transfers and changing is just too confusing. They feel out of place at cosmopolitan shopping malls. The times are bad so they rather avoid paying so much to travel to the city centre nor pay $5 for a plate of char kway tiao. They get lost in the city centre that so many of us travel with ease and efficiency.
While you and I easily straddle and traverse Singapore’s distinct divided cityscape of the heartland HDB and the cosmopolitian city centre daily, let us not forget that there are those around us who are lost in their very own city just because it was not built for them.
Out my window, behind the block
this departs from our usual topic on reclaiming spaces, but they’re really nice documentations of urban life:
1. Behind the Block (left)
Discovered photographer Tobias Zielony from the book Shrinking Cities, an anthology that explores places of diminishing appeal. A snippet on Zielony’s work:
Behind the Block is a series of photographs portraying the everyday life of youths in Newport, Bristol, Marseille, and Halle. The search of their own identity no longer takes place in the school or family, but instead on the street or “behind the block”.
The series puts together his different projects on youths, but there’s only a limited glimpse online. It’s his documentation of their banal, quiet moments — rather than flurried activity — that makes it so poignant.
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2. Out My Window (bottom)
Gail Albert Halaban works on a documentary photography project on New York’s landscape through the window views of people. Her process is documented here, with snippets of interviews, and you can tell that the city is constantly changing with people having to adapt to it. Her final work was published in New York Magazine along with this really interesting article, Alone Together, that explores how urban loneliness might actually be a myth.
Her portfolio carries the entire collection.
