Glimmer: The City as Oddity

Mary Stang

Glimmer: The City as Oddity describes and visualizes the disorienting nature of the constructed landscape and surroundings we inhabit. It is based on my personal experience of living in San Francisco for a year and navigating the new terrain I was occupying through analog photography. The photographs themselves abstract and patternize the architecture, at once both simplifying and distorting reality. The images are printed in the darkroom through a process of multiple exposures at different sizes to create the visual distortion and blur, then digitally scanned, in order to be printed at a larger scale. These visuals emphasize the disorienting construction of the modern city and serve to instill my own personal experiences within the viewer. The large scale immerses the viewer into the image, placing them into the setting of the city, blurring the lines between photography and reality.