Michael T. Martin
culture & the contemporary city
Kodachrome New York, 1940’s. What a city.
Post-industrialism made tangible. Photos of the factories where Clevelanders used to work.
The structures she explores world-wide seem just as naked as she is.
Photos by Miru Kim
(via My Modern Met )
Cities of Ghosts
Whenever I walk around a city I can’t help but imagine what it was like at some point in the past. Owning partially to my love of history and just generally romanticizing the past, engaging in nostalgia I never experienced, I think of the people who once inhabited the space I’m currently traversing.
When I lived in Amsterdam I imagined what Nieuwmarkt must have been like when it was a detention center for Jewish people during World War Two. In New York I tried to imagine when South Street Seaport was bustling with longshoremen and not just tourists. Now, in New Orleans, a city where we don’t even bury our dead, I am constantly imagining turn-of-the-century juke joints and Reconstruction-era block parties. The thing with New Orleans is you don’t have to dig too deep to feel like the imagination is transposed onto everyday reality.
These photos by Dutch artist Jo Teeuweisse get right at the heart of all these complicated feelings of the glory of the everydayness of the past. While some of his photos are truly celebratory, especially the ones involving the Liberation, others are just of regular folks smiling for the camera.
Check out his Flickr set for more.
(Via How to be a Retronaut)
“Reducing the city to its plain, naked existence is for me a way to approach the essence of the place. Although the streets are devoid of people, traces of everyday life and activity are found everywhere. In the sallow morning light, Berlin’s makeup seems about to crumble, and a transformation happens: things, buildings, places you have seen a thousand times before appear strange and new. In a while, nothing will look the same. ” - Photographer Frank Schirrmeister
