A cute picture of two Iranian skater girls is cropping up online and it is from the work of Brandon Stanton’s “Humans of Tehran” project. I did a little digging and came up with some interesting pictures from Stanton himself (check out the parkour shot) and also some others posted on a forum. These show kid skating round Vanak Square and also the new park project and skatepark that is about to open. It looks mighty impressive.

All pretty timely as tomorrow in class we cover skateboarding, parkour and emotional ties to the city.

Hong Kong at Night

These photos are of course an absolute fiction. Hong Kong would have to be plunged into a radical form of darkness for such a scene to exist. The power would have to go and all vehicles would have to have their batteries drained. These beautiful images are evocative of a system collapse. Perhaps all the more powerful as in Hong Kong we too seldom see the sky  in the daytime, fighting an endless tide of acrid smog.

We can not see stars at night above cities because of light pollution, but in the project by Thierry Cohen we can begin to imagine what might be out there, clouded by the dominating lights of domestic apartments, offices, and neon advertisements. 

The juxtaposition between the impressive modern cities and the ageless beauty of the cosmos is poignant.

The quite city is however melancholy and unsettling. It is arguably the power of seeing the city surrendered, quiet and passive that is the most alluring aspect of these images. Suggesting that perhaps that if we were to witness the end of the world it would, from the right vantage point, be breathtaking.

From the website…

Stand in New York or Rio and look up, even on the most cloudless night, and you won’t see Cohen’s explosions of light. Yet it is there, blotted out only by man’s interference…

…Cohen hasn’t simply shown us the skies that we’re missing, by the way. His process is many degrees more complex than that. Notice how dead his cities look, under the fireworks display above? No lights in the windows, no tracers of traffic? Barely even reflections of the blazing starry glory above. That’s because they are in fact photographed in the daylight hours, when lights are switched off or shine out less brightly. How clever this is, each photographic obstacle to Cohen’s expression isolated, and solved to perfection.

These pictures of a variety of skaters, some well known, some less well known, come from a blog called the Skatorialist. Little information is on the blog, but it is run by photographer Sam Ashley.

The title of the blog is a neologism and portmanteau. The emphasis being on fine tailoring and skateboarding.

I have been preparing for a course on the experience of the body in human culture. One thing that I have been looking at is our engagement with the world through material objects that in some ways become part of our physical experience.

Simply think of your phone.

For skateboarders there is similarly an experience with the board. How could one describe this? Perhaps a fifth limb? Or for those familar with the “His Dark Materials”, a dæmon? It might be described as relational but extrabodily.

Well this blog juxtaposes the two elements. without the boards, these are just people, with the boards they are given a different context and meaning. Skateboards have long been used as fashion accessories. It always seems bizarre to me. Probably because it always looks so false. Yet these photos strike a different chord to the fashion pictures. There seems to be something very simple here, but also honest. Perhaps in these pictures the camera has captured that enigmatic relationship between board and person. Between body and object.

(Thanks to Joey for the tip)

I think this collection of pictures is just fantastic. I really appreciate how it has captured the quieter side of Hong Kong too. Credit to the photographer, great job.

alexanderhadjidakis:

A selection from my Day & Night: Hong Kong series. www.alexanderhadjidakis.com