Marie Hanrahan Photography: Environment: City (War)

(Some of the information and images below have already been posted on my blog as this was my original idea for my last project but discovered that it was more suited to the city theme. I felt that I should re post it so that all of my research was together and it is clear where my ideas have come from.)

Ideas

-Firstly I started by thinking about change. This is a very broad concept to be looking at but was a good starting point as it got me thinking about change throughout the world and our own country.

-At first when I thought of change I was drawn to the idea of development. London seemed the best place as it is always developing, is close so would be easy to get to to photograph and there are many interesting areas that could be suitable to photograph.

-I found by looking at development that I just ended up researching the most common buildings in London that are frequently photographed. This lost my interest as I hope to create images with a story behind them and not just post card prints.

- I started typing London - 1980, 1960 etc until I reached 1940 which caught my eye. This was during the second world war and London was the main target of the blitz. London looked so different when up in smoke and I find the historical aspect quite exciting.

-Inspired by these images and my first pastiche task in this project I have decided that I want to find photographs that were taken of buildings and areas that were damaged during the blitz, go to the same places now and photograph what is there now. I hope to take thie image in a similar way but obviously it will not always be possible to be accurate as much has changed over the years so I may just have to photograph what is there now.

World War II

I chose to look at buildings that were affected by World War II for a few reasons. The main reason was that it was the last War that took place in England and therefore the most recent. I hoped that the fact that it was the most recent would mean that there was more photographic documentation than there would have been from previous wars. Another reason is that I have always found the second world war of great interest and is a topic that you study from a young age.

The main bomb raids on London and other large cities were between 1940 and 1941 which is referred to as the blitz.The main areas that were hit during this period were London, Liverpool, Hull, Manchester, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Nottingham, Southampton, Sheffield and Swansea. I chose to look for buildings and areas that were bombed in London because as the capital city it suffered the most. There were a high number a civilian casualties and after further research found that 29,890 Londoners died over this period and another 50,507 were admitted to hospital.

Whilst walking through London I cam across this war memorial along side the Themes. Although this was not that relevant to my research of buildings it made me think about what I was hoping to put across through my photographs as the collection will have no relevance or meaning if they are just a pastiche of someone else's image. although there is an element of looking at how London may have developed since the war I want to find areas that still remain in some way the same. I feel it would be a tragic message to show a house that was bombed and then a modern image of perhaps nothing being there at all. To me that would put forward the though that it is now forgotten as if the people that once lived there never existed. This means that when it comes to choosing old war photos to pastiche I must make sure that I carefully research what is currently in that exact area. I could also approach the image research in two different way, either find images of homes so that the images are more personal or a wider area that could tell the story of the thousands that died throughout London. Either way I want my final images to show the buildings or areas as similar as possible to how they were in the original photos but restored almost as a symbol of respect to those that were effected.

Bombed London

I looked for photographs from World War 2 in the 1940's of areas that were effected by the bombing. It is easy to find images of destroyed areas however there were specific things that I was looking for. I needed images of buildings that I could find the address or atleast most of the address for or it would be impossible for me to find. This criteria lead to to a lot of dead ends when looking for images.

I also need to find images that would be possible to mimic. If the photos have been taken from a birds eye view or are obviously taken from a higher point it is unlikely that I would be able to achieve this.

I am planning to use google map and the internet in general to try and see what the places that I have found in these photographs looks like now as they may not be worth shooting or housing etc may no longer exist there.

Below are a collection of images that I have found that hopefully are suitable. I still need to research deeper but have found addresses or atleast area name for each image.