Gregor Graf: Hidden Town

For my project ‘In the city’ I want to create a series of images that remove the advertisements we are bombarded with every time we go into any city.

Manchester is a city full of big corporations and massive amounts of advertising. We see billboards and posters so much they blend into the city because they are everywhere. We are used to seeing them and they seem natural. In my project I want to take photos from the streets but cover all the advertising within the shot and show that the photos look unnatural because we’ve become so accepting of corporate advertising.

I want people to realise how much advertisement there actually is in a city and that because we are so used to it streets look strange when they are all covered up. I want people to see the photographers and then take notice of just how many signs/advertisements there are on one street. I think people use them as a point of reference and landmarks to remember where things are but if they are removed people are forced to look at the city more. They would be more aware of the people and buildings around them and could even possibly be more social.

In modern day society people are detached from the world around them and often rely on advertising to get information about what’s happening in the city. Walking through Manchester you are bombarded with offers from retailers, banks, travel agencies and much more and so people are always aware of when a high street retailer is having a sale. If these advertisements were to be removed I think people would people focus more on the city, the buildings around them and the people they are passing.

Gregor Graf is a photographer who has produced a series of photographs with a very similar message. He has traveled the world photographing popular cities but he then removes all the signs and people from the photos to create a somewhat unnatural setting. The tagline of his project was “How can we read a city without signs?”. He looked at the effect visual advertising has on cities and how they look if they are completely removed.

His final shots are phenomenal and much more technical than I could achieve with mine as he obviously has a lot of experience with postproduction. Instead of cloning out with signs like Graf has I will just be masking over the advertisements with solid blocks of colour so you would still be able to see a billboard but it would be blank.

His photos from this project seem empty and fake because everything with associate with a busy high street has been removed, the identity of the city has been removed as he has taken it to the extremes and removed the names of shops and all evidence of human life to create some what apocalyptic shots.

http://www.gregorgraf.net/warschau.html