URBAN NOTEBOOKS
My work uses photographs to explore the creation of meaning in modern constructed urban environments.
Theorists tell us that we can find meaning in cities through everyday practices, that people in the course and movement of their everyday lives define the spaces that they use and inhabit.
This work pursues the meaning of space created through these quotidian spatial practices.
Without reference to maps or books, people in cities become my guides. These photographs are made as I walk through cities, following strangers as they go about their everyday lives. No-one is followed for long, not long enough for me to become concerned with them as individuals. They act as a collective set of city dwellers who define their city and show it to me.
The route and direction of each walk is dependent on the movement of the people I choose to follow, the photographs taken as a product of chance encounters within the rigour of a framework set for myself.
The photographs do not describing the way a city looks, or even how it feels, but are a contiguity of fragments each one extracted from its moment in the course of someone else's life.
Through these liminal photographs we are taken away from usual tourist routes and sites, we are led off the surface of tourist maps and guides. This search for meaning takes us to the gap between the scars made by official histories and the footfall of those who inhabit these places.
Graeme Vaughan
Images taken from the series 'Urban Notebooks' © Graeme Vaughan
After completing his photography education in 2009, Graeme has exhibited his works ‘Warsaw: A notebook’ at Cube Gallery in Manchester, and ‘Observations (after Prufrock)’ at Elysium Gallery in Swansea, his books Warsaw: a notebook and Palermo: A notebook are sold through Impressions Gallery, Bradford.
He was recently a finalist in the Shots / YPU young Photographers for 2010 and in the SUNRISE awards for emerging photographers working in the north of England.
Graeme studied a B.Sc. Applied Psychology / Sociology between 1988-92 and completed an M.A. Social Work Practice in 1994 before turning to photography.
He first worked as a research assistant for the offender profiling research unit, exploring relationship between environments and behaviour.
During his recent photography education at mid-Cheshire college he developed his work on constructed environments alongside commissioned projects including The Dwellings, an Arts Council funded project with residents of Victoria Square in Manchester, the oldest municipal housing scheme in the UK.
For more information on Graeme's work please visit www.photogas.co.uk
Posted by Roxana Allison
