Silent City
By Mark Crean
New Online Photography Exhibition
Silent City is a walk through the city of Oxford after dark, when the uncanny world of the night comes out to play.
The journey began in early 2020 as a documentary of urban strangeness, but as the Covid-19 pandemic took hold it turned into something completely different. I was no longer walking through a famous place called Oxford, a fabled city of dreaming spires, but a zone more like a Tarkovsky film: an exhausted, dilapidated and sometimes sinister place now entirely bereft of people.
© Mark Crean, 2020.
“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals
something else” (Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities).
This is not the Oxford of a thousand tourist brochures but the Oxford that the many who live here today may recognize as the more real.
Silent City is an online exhibition using Kunstmatrix, a 3D virtual gallery system. Like the huge growth in online video conferencing, the virtual gallery is one of many new technologies brought to the fore by the global pandemic and which is sure to influence the way we communicate and share in future.
©Mark Crean, 2020.
Location
About the photographer
I knew photography was for me and it was time for a switch after a career in London book publishing.
Currently I am in my second year of studying for an MA in Photography at Falmouth University. I live in Kidlington, Oxfordshire.
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