city:camden

Camilo Jose Vergara | Tracking time.
▻https://www.camilojosevergara.com/About-This-Project/1

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For more than four decades I have devoted myself to photographing and documenting the poorest and most segregated communities in urban America. I feel that a people’s past, including their accomplishments, aspirations and failures, are reflected less in the faces of those who live in these neighborhoods than in the material, built environment in which they move and modify over time. Photography for me is a tool for continuously asking questions, for understanding the spirit of a place, and, as I have discovered over time, for loving and appreciating cities. My focus is on established East Coast cities such as New York, Newark and Camden; rust belt cities of the Midwest such as Detroit and Chicago; and Los Angeles and Richmond, California. I have photographed urban America systematically, frequently returning to re-photograph these cities over time. Along the way I became a historically conscious documentarian, an archivist of decline, a photographer of walls, buildings, and city blocks. Bricks, signs, trees, and sidewalks have spoken to me the most truthfully and eloquently about urban reality. I did not want to limit the scope of my documentation to places and scenes that captured my interest merely because they immediately resonated with my personality. In my struggle to make as complete and objective a portrait of American inner cities as I could, I developed a method to document entire neighborhoods and then return year after year to re-photograph the same places over time and from different heights, blanketing entire communities with images. Studying my growing archive, I discover fragments of stories and urban themes in need of definition and further exploration. Wishing to keep the documentation open, I include places such as empty lots, which as segments of a sequence become revealing. I observe photographic sequences to discover how places evolve, and to formulate questions. I write down observations, interview residents and scholars, and make comparisons with similar photographs I had taken in other cities. Photographs taken from different levels and angles, with perspective-corrected lenses, form a dense web of images, a visual record of these neighborhoods over time. My photographic archive of poor, minority communities across the country evolved over decades. The stages can be divided according to the film and type of camera used. In the early 1970s, as a street photographer who focused on people, I used High Speed Ektachrome. Then, as I concentrated on time-lapse photography of the urban fabric, I turned to Kodachrome 64, a stable color film that came out in the mid-1970s. In combination with a small 35 mm camera, it provided me with the medium speed and fine grain emulsion appropriate for creating a lasting archive of buildings and city blocks. After it was discontinued in 2010, Fujichrome Provia 100 became my film of choice. I have used it concurrently with digital photography since 2005. For quick access to my collection I have made a selection of 2,500 digital images and archived them using Adobe LightRoom, which provides a system for organizing my digital collection according to place, time and subjects. It is also invaluable for gathering images to update, as well as to prepare articles, books and exhibitions.

Vyse Avenue, South Bronx, NY (1980-2013)

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Les Etats-Unis ouvrent les données des services de #police - Citylab
▻http://alireailleurs.tumblr.com/post/119508803174

En visite à Camden, ville pilote où les homicides ont diminué de 50% depuis 2012, le président Obama a lancé une initiative pour développées des #données_ouvertes sur les services de police, rapporte Citylab. L’enjeu : enclencher une tactique pour une police du 21e siècle qui à la fois réduit la criminalité et renforce la confiance. 21 services de police ont dès à présent rejoint l’initiative rendant publique des données sur l’utilisation de la force et le comportement de la police, à l’image des données qu’utilisait déjà le Centre pour l’équité de la police de l’université de Californie. Alors que plusieurs services de police ont mis en place des systèmes d’alertes pour identifier les agents qui pourraient avoir des difficultés dans leur interaction avec le public, l’enjeu de l’utilisation de ces données est (...)

#politique_publique #open_data

Geopolitical everyday

This blog is a partial record of a conversation between the students and faculty of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (UCL), the local residents of the London Borough of Camden and the ex-Yugoslav diaspora and myself.

This project is part of the residency that ran between February and November of 2010 at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (UCL) and has been made possible by a grant from the Leverhulme Trust. The pricipal grant holder is Dr Ger Duijzings, the author of ‘Religion and the Politics of Identity in Kosovo‘, and my co-author of the movie lebensraum | living space (80 min, 2009).

In the past few years I have been exploring London and trying to understand how we are influenced by spaces we live in, how we understand and produce them. Space is a common medium and we share ideas, feelings and uses of it. The immigrant experience of space (which I share) provides a fruitful starting point. Expressions which sound complicated and theoretical are to the immigrant commonplace: ‘diasporic space’, ‘the multi-local’, ‘the transnational’, ‘the geopolitical everyday’. It provides a counterpoint to the way the indigenous community see their home and homeland. Together with the indigenous experience of space, the immigrant experience clashes with the way the State and capital try to determine the layout of our lives.

I have also been exploring the break-up of Yugoslavia not from a historical point of view, but as a cross between the personal and collective, between the geopolitical and the everyday. I am interested in expressing how the very different ex-citizens of a nation which have been scattered throughout the world, live and work in London, how they construct their allegiances, how they choose to remember their lives and the lives of others and how all of this is played out in the metropolis and megalopolis that London is. I am interested in how these processes change London and the Balkans.

Generation after generation of students and teachers at The School of Slavonic and East European Studies have been trying to understand some of these questions from the standpoints of history, economics, anthropology, linguistics, politics, journalism, cinema studies, urbanism… All of this accumulated knowledge and evolving understanding is a treasure that mostly remains hidden due to its technical nature and the role of higher education in our society. I am interested in taking this knowledge for a walk in the surrounding streets of London. I would also like to explore the potential for staff and students to embody, perform and challenge their academic work in different ways, through making movies. The School resides in the Borough of Camden and as such shares its local and metropolitan history.

The experience of the Borough of Camden by local residents is unique and is an archive that cannot be found in books or films. It is a living space which is produced, preserved and modified by generations of immigrant and indigenous communities, by passers-by, plants and animals. In trying to trace how this space has changed, I want us to also try and envisage a shared vision of it for the future.

For some time now, I have been making movies as a spatial practice. To make movies as ‘spatial practice‘, means to use moving images to try and understand the space we live in (the space in front of the camera) and the space we are represented in (the space of the screen). It also supposes that there is a relationship between the two, which I believe goes both ways. It is a striving to understand and perfect the mechanisms that we use to translate from one space into the other.

As outcomes of this process, we created 4 #films:

Whose Fitzrovia? (4.19 min) WATCH

Whose Fitzrovia? Interview with Anna Minton (8.14 min) WATCH

Ripples (45 min) – a film entirely shot within 1 square mile of the BT telecommunication tower, which explores the tower and the surrounding area from different perspectives: the quotidian comings and goings, the local architecture, the changing of the seasons, urban redevelopment, a tarot reading, an account of local history, macroeconomic and metropolitan processes, critical geopolitics, a mantra chant and science fiction elements. It counterposes London’s BT tower with Belgrade’s Avala tower to explore our fascination with these structures, their military and civilian use as well as the imaginary space they create, be it national, psychological or as a local landmark. WATCH

April Showers (45 min) – a film exploring the everyday activities of a student terrorist group. Revolutionary rhetoric is mixed with boredom and house chores. Interviews with scholars question the motivation and the exact nature of the group’s activities. The film explores the limits of liberalism and student radicalisation from an everyday perspective. WATCH

#terrorisme

You can contact me on : tetrys@posteo.de
▻https://geopoliticaleveryday.wordpress.com

@reka : il y a probablement de trucs super intéressants à découvrir car j’ai reçu ce lien d’une personne dont j’ai beaucoup d’estima, mais là j’ai pas le temps...