Keegan Gibbs (Taste Of Digbeth research)

Keegan Gibbs is a photographer who is not quite in the ranks of "famous" photographers yet so is very hard to find information on even on the internet but i have followed his work by checking on up on his website regularly for a few months now and my favorite set of  photographs he has released are the ones he took in New York whilst following round street artists whilst they do their work, i found this photo set particularly interesting because of the whole retro feel to it it almost looks like some of the shots could have been taken in the early 90's from the overall grainy gritty aesthetic they have.

Because i don't live anywhere near the Digbeth area and hadn't seen any of it before we started this project i didn't really know what to base my project around but as soon as i started exploring the area the first thing i noticed was the amount of graffiti and that is what made me want to use Keegan as part of the research for this project.

Taste Of Digbeth

I shot all of these pictures in monochrome to capture the detail in the images for some of them I have used two different versions one darker and one lighter I did this to show how you can change the mood of a picture just by editing it in Photoshop, I changed the brightness and contrast to achieve this effect I also edited the sharpness on all of the images to add more detail and to make the images more crisp, The main focuses of the images are street art, urban landscapes, textures and abandoned areas.

Ben de Biel (taste of digbeth research)

Ben de Biel is the photogapher that best documented the dereliction and fast-paced mutation of East Berlin's Mitte district in the 1990. 'Artiste bohème', squat activist, legendary club owner, Ben is an icon and prime witness of the post-Wall Berlin. Since the early 90's, he relentlessly captures on film the daily changes that occured in his Mitte district, archiving the documents, accumulating raw material year after year.

I have chosen to research Ben De Biel because for my project on Digbeth i will be exploring the run down areas because i think they are a lot more interesting to photograph than the normal buildings and surroundings in the Digbeth area, i will also be taking all of my photographs in monochrome/black and white because i believe it gives the images a lot more life and makes them more aesthetically appealing as when you think of run down abandoned places you don't think of how bright the colours are or how much variation there is in the colours in the places you think of gloomy and dark which is hard to capture in full colour photographs but in black and white you can really capture the mood of the places.