Sohei Nishino's methods of creating these images are painstaking. He walks around a city's streets for an average of three months, taking 100s of different vantage points on 100s of rolls of exposed film. Then, he prints all of the photographs by hand and takes hours upon hours to arrange them together. We are left with a very untraditional view of a city: the huge range of perspectives leaves an almost 3D effect. This is also why it isn't a traditional bird's eye view. Interestingly, from a distance the collages seem almost abstract, however up close you see the dramatic, threatical intracies of the city. I think this is why they give such a lasting impression of disorder: the constant miniature detail, all in the same bleak tones from the film, is just overwhelming.
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Nishino has literally travelled all over the world for his passion of creating these dioramas: Bern, New Dehli, London (image above left), Paris (image above right) and Osaka to name a few cities. I think what is maybe lacking in Nishino's work is a level of personality or intimacy to the cities he explores. However, Nishino disagrees: "I use photographs (single 35mm frames) of concrete objects or shapes as units to recreate a geographical representation, expressing the city through human memories and images". Perhaps Nishino is actually true to these human memories as cities can be so bleak and intimidating to us.
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second response |
WWW: All the images work really well in relation to eachother. All of them have a wide palate of colours and tones which make them unique. For example, the image on the left has a cream coloured car and brown leaves while the one above has a light blue sky and the charred insides of the building.
EBI: I could have used the symettry in more directions, not just reflected sideways or vertically but in two different directions, for example. |