At Home in a High Rise

I promised to provide a few more details about Mark Cowper's photographs of Ethelburga Tower in Battersea currently on show at The Geffrye Museum so here's a link to the website. What I loved about the show was the consistent view of each room and the way the images were displayed firstly around the room, then as a grid of smaller images in the shape of a tower block then finally projected in a space the exact same size as the rooms photographed.

I think this kind of typological appraoch to documenting space and the impact that humans have on adapting their environment might make an excellent feature of our summer project. What if we attempted to photograph all the rooms in the school from a similar point of view and then displayed them in a variety of ways? Would we need the help of a professional photographer to do this effectively? Would it make an interesting document of the building? Would we include portraits of people in the shots or photograph the building empty?

On the subject of photographing buildings, here's another link to the work of a photographer in Birmingham who documented the Longbridge car factory after it had been abandoned. There is something really poignant about these images in my opinion. One of my uncles used to work in the factory and I suppose the images represent the loss, not just of a building, but of a whole culture in that part of the country. We should probably plan to photograph the empty Thomas Tallis before it is finally demolished.