Urban Portraits

Urban Projects
can be viewed at the Loughheed House

Miranda and I went down to the Lougheed House to see Kerri Singh's Urban Projects display.

You can hear about it on this link to CBC's Homestretch, a lovely audio interview where Kerri explains what is behind some of the photos.

Miranda and I were charmed, looking at each picture alone and then joining each other to discuss what we were seeing in the images.

For a starter, we wanted to talk about the lines, the colour, the positioning of the subjects, the material objects, the family configurations, the light, the shadow, and the statement that accompanied each of the pictures.

We ended our viewing by going back for one final round, picking the picture that we would like to put up in our homes.  Miranda choose a woman who is standing by her bike.  Miranda likes the hues of brown and orange and red in the picture, how the woman's scarf ties the woman to the images in the background: the Cafe where we see its neon OPEN sign in the window, the woman's beige boots, the pole of the street light she is leaning against, even her stance is charming.

I am not sure which was the picture I wanted.  For sure the text above the "Shopping Cart Person" was imaginative and poetic. A beautiful read.

I like the abstractness of the surroundings in the artist's studio, the light on his model -- well, Kerri captured it all in more than one of the pictures.  But I kept going back to look at that one.

The more I read, the more I wanted to look back at the pictures,  I was finding a more complicated meaning in the pictures from the statements of the models.

I love reading images.  Having Miranda with me made it more fun, for she was seeing things that had passed me by.

We lingered over the picture of the woman who runs Twigs.  We read the text and then looked at the jewellery:  on her arms, her fingers, around her neck, and noticed how artfully it was placed both to the left and the right of the red-haired model.  I tried to figure out her age.  The text mentioned that she had lived through World War II, which was a good starter for my math.

Though I have lived in Calgary all of my life, I don't have a clear understanding of where the Beltline district is.  And the Beltline was mentioned often.

One of the attendants at the show brought me a map so that I could see the borders of the district to get a handle on who it was that Kerri was photographing.

On the drive home we talked about neighbourhoods, neighbours, parks, amenities and why a person might love living in the Beltline District.

A thumbs up to the Urban Portraits Project.

Thank you for letting us see the Downtown and Beltline District through your eyes, Kerri Singh.

We wanted to take some photos for the blog, but that was forbidden.  However, you can see two of the images on the CBC.ca/homestretch blog.

Check it out.

Arta