Modern Madrid

Madrid’s iconography is strictly prewar. Between the gratuitous ornamentation dripping from the buildings lining Gran Via and the interiors of crowded tapas, the city centre appears decked out in full late-19th century regalia, fit for admirers of coattails and opera gloves. Tread out along the boulevards bursting from the city’s heart, however, and Madrid’s palette of pale yellows and burnt ochres takes on a slightly different form.

In ways, the commercial outskirts of Madrid reprise a sort of cityscape that’s as rare in Europe as it is fatiguingly common elsewhere. Black-ribboned towers wrapped in shades of brown and black will slump along streets that gape by whim, rather than necessity. The packs of pedestrians thin out. Walk along the arteries feeding the gargantuan Avenida de la Castellada, drown out the cheers from the Estadio Santiago Bernabeu, and one is in downtown Denver.

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Lisboa: Up, Down, Around

The geography of Lisbon bends pespectives - up, down, and around its seven hills. Beyond the occasional slow-swooping streetcar, the dramatic undulations of the city’s streets are broken only by its graffiti, which boldly explodes against pastel-painted houses, or grafts messages - somehow both timely and timeless - deep into centuries-solid walls.

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Yokohama Sunrise

A crowd gathers to watch the first sunrise of 2008 at the Yokohama Ferry Terminal.

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Naoya Hatakeyama’s Urban Illusions

Tobu World Square’s model of New York. Photo by Naoya Hatakeyama

When I was a kid, my grandparents would take me on vacation to Victoria, BC. The highlight of the trip—for me, at least—was always a visit to Miniature World, an odd little museum tucked into the north wing of the Empress Hotel. There, I would race past dozens of dollhouses, castles and spaceships to the museum’s centrepiece, a giant model railroad. I liked it not for the trains, but for the cities: tiny recreations of everything from Victoria to Halifax, strung along the tracks like beads on a necklace.

My curiosity with models was revived last month by Naoya Hatakeyama’s exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Scales, which runs until February 3, 2008. Hatakeyama, a Japanese photographer whose work has dealt in large part with the relationship between nature and cities, was asked by the CCA in 2003 to turn his lens to three different scale models of New York and Tokyo. In the twenty-four photos that came out of the project, Hatakeyama questions, with curiosity and humour, the relationship between architecture, photography and our perceptions of reality.

Two of the models depict New York. One, found in the Windows of the World theme park in Shenzhen, China, is a strange, cartoonish vision of the city, a dilapidated landscape of crooked, colourful buildings. The model seems haphazardly constructed, like the set of a cheap disaster movie. In one photo, an approach to the Brooklyn Bridge abruptly ends in mid-air. The bridge itself is cracked and disjointed, cars scattered across it as if there had been a massive earthquake.

New York in Shenzhen’s Windows of the World

In sharp contrast to this is the model of New York found in Japan’s Tobu World Square—as detailed and realistic as Windows of the World is abstract. If you didn’t look too closely, you could be forgiven for thinking that this was the real New York. Hatakeyama, shooting in black and white, has created the illusion of reality, evoking the strongly-shadowed, iconic Manhattan of the imagination, or at least in the famous early twentieth century photos of Alfred Stieglitz.

The point here, however, is not to fool us, but to give us subtle hints that we are, in fact, looking at a model, an idealized vision of New York. Despite the cars and pedestrians on the streets, even the graffiti painstakingly drawn on the walls, there is a strange lifelessness about these buildings, their windows empty like dead eyes. In one shot, the side wall of the Plaza Hotel is inexplicably blank. In another, we see a ballcap-wearing man looming between skyscrapers like some bizarrely mundane giant.

Hatakeyama’s photos of the third model, an aerial view of a huge and incredibly detailed rendition of Tokyo, are presented as a black-and-white triptych. It’s hard to tell that the city depicted is not, in fact, the real thing.

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From Pixels Into Paint

Ste. Catherine Street, Montreal

Last June, a French artist named Franck Chambrun emailed me to say that he had created a number of paintings based on my Montreal and Hong Kong photos. I took a look at his work and, I have to say, I’m smitten, and it’s not just because he likes my photos.

Chambrun’s paintings of streetscapes are unique and eye-catching. Although they are essentially abstract — the city’s detail is reduced into layers of colour — they manage to convey the clutter, frenzy and humanity of urban life. The ostensible simplicity of his work belies a tremendous amount of depth and nuance.

To make many of his paintings, Chambrun projects a photo onto canvas and works from there. More of his work, including some interesting behind-the-scenes photos and commentary, can be found on his blog.

Causeway Bay, Hong Kong

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Parking Lot Parties on Queen West

This past Saturday in Toronto, Car Free Day was held on Queen Street West. This event was coordinated by Streets are for People, who also spearheaded events such as Pedestrian Sundays in Kensington Market. Part of the celebration involved parking meter parties, which lined the street intermittently roughly from Bathurst to Trinity-Bellwoods park . These involve the purchase of a parking ticket and the use of the spot for more creative pursuits. As parking is technically paid for, such action is a completely legal way to reclaim the street for people.

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Scenes from the Seoul Metro

Today, in the subway, I stood beside a young woman who thought it would be a good idea to place her caramel macchiato in the overhead compartment. Predictably, the cup fell over and spilled its sticky java contents all over two men wearing fairly nice looking suits. One of them quickly gave the girl a used tissue, demanding that she wipe off the coffee from his back. Nosey ajumas (older Korean women) on the other side of the train, dressed in their best hiking outfits, reached over to provide the humiliated young lady with a seemingly endless supply of tissues and moist towelettes. At first, judging by their stern faces, it seemed like the ajumas wanted the young woman to know that they were disappointed in her. As she set about the arduous task of cleaning up her mess, though, the old ladies smirked.

It was just another day in the Seoul subway, the best place in the city to watch the interaction of everyday Koreans of various ages and social classes. Seoul’s subway system is one of the most extensive in the world. It consists of eight lines, spanning 287 kilometres, connecting virtually all neighbourhoods within this massive metropolis of over 20 million people. There are currently 266 metro stations, from the Incheon International Airport near the coast of the Yellow Sea, to the distant northern suburb of Uijeongbu, down to the posh “new cities” of Gangnam (the district south of the Han River) and then out east to a rusty, Soviet-like area called Sangil-dong.

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“This is Where We Make Good on Life”

Sometime around the St. Patrick’s Day snowstorm that undid all of the progress spring had made so far, somebody decided to give people in Mile End a bit of an escape from the weather. Photos of green parks, summery shadows and outdoor cafés have been stapled onto hydro poles near St. Viateur Street. Only one of the pictures has a caption: “This is where we make good on life,” it reads in faded blue ink.

The Subway Every Day

F train, 8:40am. Photo by Travis Ruse

Whenever I try to read on the bus or metro, my eyes invariably slide up and over to the other passengers on board. Considering I will never see most of them again, reading their faces is far more interesting than whatever book or magazine I have in front of me.

It would seem I’m not alone. For more than two years, photoblogger Travis Ruse has been haunting the subway tunnels of New York, documenting the people on his daily commute. What stands out is not his subject matter—subway life has been documented by photographers going all the way back to Walker Evans in 1938—but his unique ability to capture, on a daily basis and with surprising intimacy, the human richness of New York mass transit.

R train, 6:35pm. Photo by Travis Ruse

Scenes from a Lost Vancouver

Earlier this week, on a remarkably sunny afternoon, I walked down Robson Street and into the Vancouver Art Gallery. I was there to see images of a lost Vancouver.

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“The City as an Avatar of Itself”

“Neighbourhoods” by Hamish Grant

My first exposure to tilt-shift photography was in 2004, when I visited Olivo Barbieri’s Site Specific: Montreal exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Commissioned to compliment the CCA’s great show on Montreal in the 60s, Barbieri used a tilt-shift lens to photograph major 1960s-era Montreal landmarks from the air: the Maison Radio-Canada, Westmount Square, Place Ville-Marie, Place des Arts, the Metropolitan expressway and La Ronde, among others. The result was a series of images that transformed Montreal into something as pristine and perfect as a scale model.

Such is the effect produced by a tilt-shift lens, which fools the eye into thinking it is looking at something much smaller than it really is. When used to document urban landscapes, the city becomes, in Barbieri’s words, “an avatar of itself.” Last year, he explained his mission to Metropolis: “I was a little bit tired of the idea of photography allowing you to see everything. After 9/11 the world had become a little bit blurred because things that seemed impossible happened. My desire was to look at the city again.” So far, Barbieri has shot Rome, Amman, Las Vegas and Shanghai.

Recently, tilt-shift photography—both the authentic kind and Photoshop imitations—has become popular on photo-sharing sites such as Flickr. When it’s done well, it achieves a similar surreal quality to Barbieri’s work, transforming the hard-edged reality of aerial views into something softer and more ambiguous.

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Time-Travelling in Montreal

Montreal ‘87? Try Montreal ‘72. Flickr habitué Colin Rose recently delved into his photographic archives and pulled out some remarkable shots from the early 1970s. Some depict a massive snowstorm that coincided with a blue collar workers’ strike, which left downtown streets impassable for days. Others focus on Montreal’s art deco architecture. Since they are all scanned from slides, the photos have a particularly crisp quality that makes them look as if they were taken yesterday, not thirty-five years ago.

What makes Rose’s photos so interesting is they they reveal so many small details of everyday Montreal life. In his snowstorm set, for instance, you can’t help but notice that English street names have English signs (”Stanley St.“) while French street names have French signs (”Rue de la Gauchetière“). The Expo ‘67 logo is still affixed to lampposts on Dorchester Boulevard and Peel Street, a reminder of Montreal’s late-sixties glory. On Ste. Catherine Street, terse 1970s design (check out the classic “banque provinciale” sign) is juxtaposed against the giddy neon of an earlier era.

Then, of course, there are the cars: American behemoths on one hand, tiny Volkswagens and Peugeots on the other.

Subway Explorers

Lawrence West from David Topping’s 69 Days on the TTC

I’m a transit geek. I’m not a railfan—the mundane details of different train models and rail gauges doesn’t interest me—but I am fascinated by public transport. I pore over subway maps and admire ephemera such as old tickets or the unique, quietly confident typeface used in Toronto’s 1950s-era stations. I love how public transit—in the cities where it is a central part of life and not a marginal service for the poor—is a great social blender, bringing people from every different corner of the city together. In many ways, it is in the subway, not the streets, where the true face of a city is revealed.

That’s why I appreciate David Topping’s 69 Days on the TTC, an ambitious attempt to visit and photograph all sixty-nine of Toronto’s subway stations. Topping documents the subway’s details, captures its atmosphere and studies its users, revealing the breadth and complexity of Toronto’s urban landscape. “I’ve lived in Toronto’s west end since I was born,” he explains on Torontoist. “My Toronto—the part of the city that matters to me—has never extended further west than Kipling, further east than Yonge, or further north than St. Clair. I felt stuck.” By the end of his tour, he felt he had gained “a genuine curiosity for the city that I thought I knew everything about. There will always be more of Toronto to explore, always be more people to find and places to escape to.”

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Lighting Up the Plaza for the 77th Time

Every Thanksgiving night, the Country Club Plaza district in Kansas City, Missouri sets aglow amid thousands of revelers. The older, faux-Spanish low-rise edifices are adorned with miles upon miles of Christmas lights.

The first iterations of what is now known largely as “The Plaza” were built in the 1920s in the formerly swampish southern nether-reaches of the city. The area today serves primarily as an upscale shopping and restaurant district, as well as a home for both condominium owners and apartment renters. Offices are now prevalent as well.

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