I am becoming increasingly conscious of change, noticing how the pace is accelerating. I embrace the change, I am a technophile working for a large computer company. I just spent the last two days integrating a new 4TB drive into my computer, updating my Lightroom setup, and then adjusting my backup schedule to accommodate it. Over Christmas I installed a network aware weather station that sends updates on the CO2 level, temperature, and humidity in my home to the internet. I can then monitor my homes micro-climate from my phone anywhere in the world. I really enjoy the technical challenge of making it all work together, but at the same time have nagging doubts about whether we move too fast. Is it a good thing that my 3 year god daughter learned how to play games on her iPad before learning to speak?
I find that I want to say something about this, to explore how the world around me is changing, not to protest, but at least to comment. This brings me back to the city and the area I live in. I moved to my current home 7 years ago, in the cheap end of the high rent Bogenhausen district. Just North of my home is an area of streets filled with large expensive homes, costing many millions and inhabited by Footballers, Lawyers, and Bankers. It is where Eva Braun lived before meeting her doom. Most evenings we take a walk and jokingly discuss which house we would like to buy if we won the Lotto, actually most are beyond even that wealth. Over the years many of the original houses have been replaced by new ones. Germans view old houses as used houses and frequently will buy an old house to knock it down and build something tailored to themselves.
It struck me that there was a way to image this change and present a view of what was happening in the area. Google maps imaged the streets in 2008 creating a time stamped visual record of the buildings as they then looked. This would enable a 5 Years later on view of how the urban landscape was changing, using this modern technology to look back in time. I created a set of 11 images of buildings that I knew had changed by screen grabbing from Google and printed them 4 to a page. The rest was simply a walk around with my camera using the Google prints as a guide for location and camera position. I have attempted to get the view similar but not the same, the vantage point and the panoramic stitch used by Google defeat an exact comparison.
Importing the lot into Lightroom and creating pairs of photos using the print function to print to JPG, I ended up with the following pairs of images, each separated by roughly 5 years, well 5 and a half, summer plays winter.
Some rather nice 1930s houses are vanishing, ironically replaced by modernist buildings that are actually based on the 1920s architectural style of the Bauhaus. Pink and Yellow are giving way to a variety of shades of grey and a lot of green space has gone. I don't dislike the new houses, I would love to live in one, they are probably superb living machines, but the character of the area is changing. The softness of age is being replaced by hard edges. It is also noticeable in some cases that low hedges and iron gates are being replaced by high walls and impenetrable hedges. The redistribution of wealth in society from the poor to the rich has struck me as something similar to the change that happened in England as Anglo-Saxon gave way to Norman and the medieval world concentrated wealth in the hands of a tiny aristocracy. These new houses echo the high-walled castles built by the Normans to subdue the English.
This is simply an exploration of a few ideas coupled with a little pseudo political commentary. Might become something, might not.
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