Metropolis
By Dave Taylor
14 May 2008
My fascination with photography began with the discovery of the power that photography has to record and evoke family stories and memories – from my father's photographs of wartime Palestine, early family snaps taken with the Kodak Box Brownie in the early 1960's through to today's cutting edge digital imaging technology. Like all forms of art that bring an interpretation of the world, photography has the power to change the way people see it and see others. Photographs can bring you out of the everyday, very often through depiction of the everyday itself.
Over the years I have experimented with a range of photographic techniques including black and white portraiture and Polaroid.
In April this year (2008) I was invited to be part of a small group show called Metropolis in Melbourne, Australia. The show explored what the word "Metropolis" conveys.
The photographs were taken on a Nikon D60 Digital SLR during my first trip to Israel in March 2008. Having travelled widely and photographed cities around the world my experience of Jerusalem was particularly powerful. There I witnessed first hand the complex clash of cultures, politics and religions, events often reported on by the world's media or memorialised in public places by ordinary people.
Cities are places constructed for living, working and playing; a metropolis is nothing without its people. These photos ask how do people live their lives within those constructions, and specifically, how does a new millennium people live in an ancient millennium metropolis, in an ancient millennium land?
The photograph of Hong Kong may appear disconnected – it is intentionally so as I want to contrast the ancient with the "shiny and new."
