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June 26, 2012
I have started photographing cities in Australia--Adelaide, Melbourne and Hobart---and in the process I've became interested in David Stephenson's cities at night work.
David Stephenson, Melbourne, from Light Cities
Stephenson photographs night scenes of the major cities of the world with long exposures and conveys the luminous quality of the urban environment at night and highlights the skyscraper as an emblem of modern architecture.
David Stephenson, Vegas, from Light Cities
There is also the suggestion of the sublime in this body of work as it is reflection upon the unsustainability of our urban way of life. They cannot just keep on expanding. Every global city contains a downtown area of high buildings, with urban sprawl often extending for hundreds of square kilometres, and all those buildings glowing with electric light from sundown through to the early hours.
With the vast majority of this electric power generated by coal-fired thermal power stations, it is not difficult to see that this situation has a finite timeframe, due to global warming. This requires requiring major changes to take place in the energy infrastructure of our modern industrialized culture.
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