Photography and the Human Habitat - PROJECT PROPOSAL

1 ; 4 - Tod Papageorges

2 ; 3 - André Kertesz

5 - Garry Winogrand

In the course of my architecture studies in France and in Ireland I learn to work at different scales. Architects must be curious person and they have to explore the human life to create all of appropriate space ( exterior, interior, urban and human spaces ).

At the beginning of the semester I studied the work of Garry Winogrand. After this first analysis, I was interesting by several photographers who work about the street and public relationship between people and their city.

For the project, I propose to work on the photography of the public space and I'm wondering how design of urban furnitures influence the human posture in the street.

Step to step I discovered the work of Garry , Tod Papageorge and André Kertesz and their photos of strangers in public place. They are tree Americans photographer and explore the global street atmosphere . Through these pictures , it's really interesting to see how people live together in the street. It's for this reason that I would particularly work on the urban sitting space. Indeed , if we attentively observe the city , there are different type of sitting, " natural " and " artificial " sitting. I mean by artificial, sitting built by designer.

André Kertesz photographed people on the benches and chairs in the street and studied the chair furniture itself and its urban implantation. Tod Papageorge shows how people find and exploit themselves the sitting in the city. In these photographies I perceive a visual noise and I'm interesting by the moment where photographers capture the movement and interaction between posture of people and the urban surrounding.

At the end of researches , I would like to show a series of picture, like a documentary book which explore the contemporary city life.

Art does not reproduce the visible rather it makes visible.

Project Proposal_Philipp Gengenbach

When I was looking into the work of Bernd & Hilla Becher I came across the quotation of the famous painter Paul Klee: „Art does not reproduce the visible rather it makes visible“.

Photography is an art, so it could also be called: „Photography does not reproduce the visible rather it makes visible“.

I think this sentence describes the photographs of the Bechers in really good way. But it applies not only to the photographs of the Bechers. Also a lot of other photographs we were looking at in this course are characterized by the documentation of daily things which happen in our life. We are completely used to it and only because of the photographic documentation we begin to think about it and maybe we recognize the specialty of these things. 

I was really impressed by this statement of Paul Klee and it was helpful for a better understanding of a lot of photographs we looked at in this course. I started to look at some photographs in another kind of way.

The art of photographing not only the very special things but rather the things whose specialty you could first recognize at second glance is very interesting.

My Project Proposal should be to analyze some photographs related to this statement of Paul Klee.
I would like to pick some photographs of the photographers we were talking about but also I will try to take some photos by myself which show daily stories in the human habitat.