Esperantis by Patrick Shanahan is a seductive and unsettling insight into the nocturnal face of the modern urban environment. Taken in both Spain and Portugal between 1998 and 2001 as part of his doctoral thesis on ‘theorising the post-landscape’, these exquisite photographs explore imaginatively the notion of spatial estrangement – the material and psychological impact of the processes involved in the formation of the contemporary urban landscape.
For urban designers and engineers, modern lighting technologies offer ways to invest the urban landscape with new cultural meanings through the editing and highlighting of physical spaces. They can transform an already spectacular scene into a yet more powerful nocturnal one, one that is coloured, edited, more hyperreal and illusory. Shanahan’s photographs utilise a combination of the effects of ambient artificial lighting with the ‘reciprocity failure’ of colour photographic film – the colour shifts that occur in exposures exceeding one second – to produce even more unusual settings, ones imbued with a ‘strangeness’ symbolic of the Freudian uncanny sensation.
As the distinctions between reality and imagination blur, our feelings of anxiety and uncertainty about the contemporary world increase the more detached and isolated from our urban environments we become. In what Shanahan refers to as the ‘Luminous Uncanny’, the selective lighting of particular areas against an abstracted void causes the landscape to dematerialise into a mirage of light and shadow, infusing it with a mystery that both attracts and disturbs us.
Patrick Shannagan produjo en su d
Offtopic: Si me confirmas que eres de Sevilla como nosotros me da un yuyu…casualidad? :S
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