CH Partners Summer School Flickr Photostream

Students conducted visual ethnographies in and around areas of Newcastle today, uploading images live to a designated Flickr photostream.

Emergent themes were:

The branding of the city, eg. souvenirs and Newcastle City council logos

Old versus new, with reference to shop fronts mainly, and heritage street furniture

‘Tribes’ and belonging, with reference to exhibitions and signage in the Great North Museum

The Romans, and subsequent touristification and branding of Newcastle as a site of historical importance (plenty of leaflets as supporting evidence!)

Regeneration: images in particular of The BALTIC flour mill.

Greggs: as a way of life.

Multiculturalism: photos from a bilingual bookstore, sightings of Storytime in Arabic, leaflets in Mandarin Chinese.

Identity in Newcastle: Flickr Photostream

The identity in Newcastle Flickr Photostream

Here you’ll find a recording of 700 photos about identity in The North East of England that I took, uploaded, tagged, commented on, and categorised between 2010-2012.

The photostream shows how the categorisation of photos became an integral aspect of my project; selecting and ordering the photos so they made some kind of social scientific sense, placing them within a wider context. Creating a digital archive which aimed to capture some of the moments and signifiers of ‘identity’ in the North East during this time, now provides an interesting social history of that time. How many of these moments / sites are still there? If they’ve gone, what’s replaced them? (why do you think that is?)

Identity in Newcastle Flickr albums

‘Prezzi’ Presentation on Urban Art in The North East

‘Prezzi’ Presentation on Urban Art in The North East

Between 2010 -2012 I conducted an ethnographic study of  ‘Identity in The North East’, photographing anything I deemed interesting as a comment on ‘identity’. Urban Art in the North East became an incidental but main feature of the project, as my interests grew, I started to see how urban art itself fell into different categories, and with that, held different cultural values and said different things. I’m interested in the link between urban art and place, so what art might say about an area and why.

Have a look at this Prezzi Presentation, as see what you think:

‘Prezzi’ Presentation on Urban Art

Do you agree with my classifications of urban art? What have I left out? Can you add to the collection?

Further Reading:

If you’re interested in conducting a project like this, here’s some further reading:

Metro-Roland, M, Tourists, Signs and the City: The Semiotics of culture in an urban landscape, Ashgate Publishing, London: 2012

Tourists, signs and the city : the semiotics of culture in an urban landscape

 

 

Trinity Square — composition

aphid-trinity

Here is a short piece of music I wrote for a series of photos that a friend of mine took of the Trinity Square car park as it was being torn down.

The car park was a landmark in Gateshead — famous for featuring in the 1971 film ‘Get Carter’. My friend lived in Gateshead, and would walk past the dissolving landmark every day. Watching it disappear was a shock — the kind Alvin Tofler talks about in his book ‘Future Shock’ in the way the landscape of the city can change. In the music, I wanted to try and reflect some of that distant change, some of that sadness and loss of something that you took for granted as always being there. But maybe, in the middle section, there’s also a little bit of hope about what might replace it (which was unwarrented — the new houses are horrible!)

This bring together photography and music, obviously, but it shows how creative research works as a network. Responding to the outputs that someone else has created in a different form can be a way of really expanding your groups research. There’s a famous quote — attributed variously to Laurie Anderson and Elvis Costello (among others) — “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. Well, if that’s true, then we’d love to see your groups dancing about architecture by combining different media together!