When the City Isn’t looking
By Bill Peters
I began to fully appreciate photography as an expressive medium when I started to understand painting. On this journey of understanding, the words of Georgia O’Keefe struck with particular force, “Nothing is less real than realism… it is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis that we get at the real meaning . . .”
I’d been struggling to interpret cities visually for years. In 2006, equipped a new set of visual and printing tools, I began to see cities in a new way. First the Canon 5D, and later the 1Ds Mark III and the 5D Mark II enabled making images of remarkable dynamic range, colour depth and clarity, while maintaining a great deal of mobility. The ability to work without a tripod at dusk or even after dark opened a new range of possibilities. With this technology I was able to make emotionally true images that were fragments of an entire scene, sometimes highly abstracted in terms of colour, reflection, layering and sharpness. I’ve long maintained that you can’t really know a city until you have walked it, and with this kind of equipment I can range over a city with a camera body, a couple of lenses and a pocket full of memory cards and batteries for whole days at a time.
When I started making prints of my city work I was disappointed in the 16x20 images. Artistically the work simply wanted to be larger. Carefully uprezing the files, I found I could comfortably print images 24x36 inches and even larger in some instances. The large images were printed on an HP z3100 24 inch printer and an Epson 9600 44 inch printer. The HP handled the high colour saturation I wanted particularly well and for these prints the HP Gloss Enhancer gave a lovely surface and improved the print’s abrasion resistance.
“When the City Isn’t Looking” opened at the Gallery of Photographic Arts – Canada in Calgary’s Art Central in November of 2008. The images are currently represented by Willock and Sax Gallery in Banff.
All Images ©Bill Peters. www.photomagica.com
About the Photographer
Bill Peters has been making images for over forty years. He has worked extensively in large format, 35mm film and in digital. He is also known for the cameras he builds and he has built or modified cameras for some of the world’s great photographers. Right now he is working on extending “When the City Isn’t Looking” with new images from New York, Montreal and Regina and building a portfolio of his cities images.
