Looking for an old photos

These are some Bournville women that I found:

Julia Varley

Cadbury's workers

Cadbury's angels

Dame Elizabeth Mary Cadbury

As I am going to make my images with screen print the photographs don't need to be a very good quality ones as I will need to bitmap them. But I there are not many images on the Internet so I will go to the Birmingham Library to find more.

The prototype

Second part of the Bournville Village project

The second part is a PRINT. It can be anything : a booklet, poster, small book and etc.

I thought about making a booklet but after one to one tutorials I changed my mind. The new idea is to make something like 'paper version of Photoshop' as this program was the main toll in my video. As Photoshop has many layers I decided to have one image (a portrait) in different colours printed on a semi see-through paper :

    

When you put these layers on top of each other you can create different colours. Later on I improved my idea and decided to have more images than one portrait. It would still be the same image but separated - on one just the hair, on the other one just the face. This is the prototype :

The picture that I used:

As I was creating the prints with silk screen print I had to change the image into black and white and then bitmap it:

then I created different layers:

For my final I will make more layers, add some nowadays accessories - hat, earrings and etc. The colours I am using: magenta, cyan, yellow and black.

The format is going to be A4 and all of the layers are going to be presented as a box book. Something like in the image below but I want the box to have a simple separated lid.

I am still not sure if I should leave the box simple looking and in the brown cardboard colour or change it into Photoshop background like this:

For my prototype I used a random image, but I would like to go back to my original idea and back to Bournville Village. I believe there should be some old pictures of  Bournville women.

Final video

My final video:

 
The Unchanging from Valda Repcyte on Vimeo.

 I still have a feeling that it is a bit too long. I edited this video with Adobe Premier program and all video clips are speeded to the maximum. I will try to cut some bits and pieces out and make it shorter.

Progress

Trip to the Library

I started working on this photograph :

I already had 3 hours of footage but the quality of the picture was really bad. After our presentation in university I went to Waterstones in order to find some old photos of Birmingham in books. I particularly liked Alton Douglas photography books. They were quite expensive so I went to The Library of Birmingham and found a small section called Photobooks of Birmingham. I went though a lot of books but not many of them had what I needed. The most useful book was Central Birmingham Through Time by Eric Armstrong and Vernon Frost. 

 I found one photo that I really liked and wanted to scan it into a computer but the library did not had these facilities. So I came back here the next day with my photo camera and here is the result :

Unfortunately, it does not say anything about the photo itself in the description billow. At least I know that the photo is from early 1900's as Victorian Square still has 3 sculptures (in 1912 there is only one left). I took this photo in RAW and fixed it up in the Photoshop later on. It has much better quality then the one I am using now and if I wont find a better photograph I will use this one for my final video. 

Sticking with the original idea

I peeked to the calendar and noticed that I have only 12 days till the video deadline. At this point I already want to be doing something, not just wondering around and thinking of a new ideas. I really enjoyed making that one minute video, working on an old picture, putting colour into it, changing old fashioned clothes into bright, sometimes crazy new ones. I got some feedback when I showed my video and it said that I am kind of stuck with the Bournville, why not changing the location, find a better picture. And yes, I would love to find a bit more fascinating picture then the one I used.

In the depths of  the Internet I have lost a track of time while roaming through an old pictures. Here are a few that I have found :

Old London

Camden Town Five Ways junction 1920's

The Odeon Cinema, Great Victoria Street, Belfas, 1962

Royal Avenue, Belfast, from Castle Place looking towards North Street (from first floor level) 19/5/1936

These are all fantastic photographs but later on I stumbled upon this one:

Warwickshire, Birmingham, New Street c. late 1950's

I was shocked to see Birmingham and not even because I found this picture so randomly but the fact that the New Street looks so familiar to today's one is fascinating. And I thought why not Birmingham? Especially city centre - Victoria Square. After all, the firs time I came to Birmingham I was not pleased with the city until I saw The Victoria Square and The Council House in it. This would be a perfect opportunity for me the get to know more about it. 

I started to look for more pictures and I found this lovely website that has a lot of pictures of old Birmingham. Here are a few :

Warwickshire, Birmingham Broad Street with merchant horses and carts. I love that this picture has Boots store in it already. 

Warwickshire, Birmingham, New Street.

Warwickshire, Birmingham, Council House 1900's

Warwickshire, Birmingham, Council House c.1915. 

The last picture was my favourite one so I tried to look for more photographs with Council House in them. Here is what I found:

The Town Hall and Council House on Victoria square.

Birmingham Council House, early 1900's.

Victoria Square and the Council House, 1912.

This view of Victoria Square and the Council House from around a hundred years ago gives the impression of being pedestrianised as it is today, though in fact the Council House was surrounded by roads and Victoria Square was criss-crossed by roads too, there was just a great deal less vehicular traffic, with cars still being something of a minority on the roads. The land for the Council House and Museum and Art Gallery was purchased in 1853, and in 1870 the Council finally agreed to build offices for the Corporation on the site. H R Yeoville Thomason was appointed architect in 1871. The Mayor, Joseph Chamberlain, laid the foundation stone in 1874. The building was completed in 1879, and at the opening ceremony 'dancing continued with vigour till midnight.' Only 20 years later an extension was needed; this was completed in 1912 and can be seen in the background, behind the Clock Tower. 

via

This is how I found Digital Birmingham Photo Archive. You won't find much, even they say that it is only a small collection and you can find more at Birmingham Central Library, but I like the neat way of displaying the photos - everything is in chronological order and if you need a specific year they are nicely  separated in folders. I haven't found anything else useful in there but the photographs were still fun to watch. 

One more really nice webpage is www.historypin.com where you just need to zoom in on the map and you will see some photos are pined to a different places all over your city.

At the moment I am struggling between the two last photographs. I am leaning toward the last one more, but I am still not sure. 

Inspirational Artist

Today in university we had our presentations. I thought that our videos have to be related to Bournville but as our tutor informed me - it doesn't! My mind is blown away right now. I have a few ideas already but I am worried that they are too simple, with no deep meaning and so on.

But at first my inspiration - Thomas Lamadieu (also known as Root Art).

“My artistic aim is to show a different perception of urban architecture and the everyday environment around us, what we can construct with a boundless imagination,” says Thomas. 

I can choose any photograph/place that I feel inspired by and change it as I see it. I have a few ideas of what I will be looking for:

• I wanted to find some abandoned or poorly maintained places and fix them up a bit.
• Or a really dark and sad places that needs cheering up.
• Another idea is to find some weird looking buildings that in my eyes look totally different. For example, new Birmingham Library for me looks like a giant wedding cake so it would be fun to draw a giant man trying to cut the library and eat it :

Changing

These are a really extreme examples of how cities are constantly changing. If not because of a natural growth then there is a history behind the change. Quite often a war like in Dubai or Dresden. But the point I am making is that this change is a part of the city, part of the town being alive, moving, growing.

Dubai

Shenzhen

Dresden

Las Vegas 

Warsaw

London's Barbican Center on Blitzed Area

And this is an example that I am going to use in my essay, It is my home town in Lithuania :

Old and new Church of Gargzdai 

Everything is changing. It is natural. More people means more needs and because of that towns have to adjust. 

We are used to see images like this - old, historical buildings with Starbucks or McDonald's in them. Nowadays, these things are ordinary to us. A lot of cities or towns have changed drastically during a decade or two.

You might think that it happened only to a large city's but my small home town is a good example to prove it wrong. It changed not only appearance but a function too and it even happened a few times. At first Gargzdai was a really empty town with only the main bread baking factory in it. After my country got independence in 1993 a few shops and restaurants started to appear. Later on young people having nothing to do organized something like a night club only with no bars or dancing till the morning (closing at 12). Unfortunately, the majority of people living in the town were pensioners and they made the club to close down. The youth still had their small skate park and some drawing, dancing, singing clubs. Only recently Gargzdai renovated the whole city centre. It is now unrecognisable. I started to notice how the government is trying to make the town look modern

with strange houses, weird looking street lights and uncomfortable benches.

After a while skate park was closed down. Then a bunch of cameras were scattered around the town. Later, the park (place where youth were gathering around) started to turn off the outdoor lights at 11pm. Also, government build a children play ground in a middle of it. This year it was announced that Gargzdai is in the third place from all Lithuania's towns that has the biggest population growth. And everybody knows why: it became a bedroom area where people working in a bigger towns come to grow their family's and have a good nights sleep with no traffic noises. 

There are a lot of examples like these, but what about the towns that haven't changed? How did they managed to keep their citizens happy and not only that, how did they manage to keep them from moving away? What is their scheme? If it is based on a quite town module how do they keep the youth entertained? Could utopian towns really exist? 

Research Utopian Towns:

Bournville Village: 

• American Towns. A lot of utopian towns no longer exists.
• American Utopian Town that still exists.
• American Towns. No longer existing towns, but this article has more information.
• Towns all over the world. No longer existing.
• NEIGHBOURHOODS THAT WORK