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Manchester 24 - Urbis Spends A Day In The Life Of The City
By Kerry Patterson
03/12/2004
Manchester 24. Photo: Kristoffer Jensen.
Kerry Patterson made her way to Urbis to see what her adopted home city gets up to in the course of a day.
Just how much can happen in the space of 24 hours? On display at Urbis until January 4 2005, Manchester 24 looks at a day in the life of 40 of the city’s inhabitants.
Each of the participants in the exhibition was given a roll of film and a Lomo camera with which to record their daily activities.
Invented in Russia, the Lomo cameras used in the exhibition have a rotating colour wheel integrated into the camera’s flash, meaning that the photographs produced feature a range of weird and wonderful colour effects.
Manchester 24. Photo: Gary Roberts.
A small selection of photographs from each city-dweller was chosen, with participants ranging from a taxi driver, airline pilot and police worker to photographers, a playwright and a prop maker.
Manchester 24 aims to provide “a window into what it feels like to live, work and play in Manchester.”
Caribbean chef Buzz Rocks is pictured working in his busy restaurant. The photographs of taxi driver Warren Valentine show Manchester by night.
Simon Walmsley, a prop maker for Cosgrove Hall is also shown at work, making models for television programmes.
Image: Shows a photograph of the view from behind a microphone on a stand of an empty auditorium.
Manchester 24. Badly Drawn Boy.
As a high rise window cleaner, Paul Ferguson shares with us the views of the Manchester skyline we don’t normally get to see. Likewise, the photographs by Gary Robertson, a night supervisor and street cleaner for Manchester City Council show his unique slant on the city.
Some well-known Manchester residents have also contributed photographs to the exhibition. These include Damon Gough, otherwise known as Badly Drawn Boy, ex-Inspiral Carpets singer Tom Hingley and Anthony Wilson.
Gough’s photographs show the domestic side of his life, including one of him taking his daughter to school on her first day.
Although the exhibition purports to show “an authentic slice of city life”, the emphasis in the majority of the photographs is very much on 20 and 30-somethings, many of whom work in creative industries.
Manchester 24. Photo: Kristoffer Jensen.
These pictures tend towards showing the young, glamorous, urban side of Manchester – probably everything the city wishes to promote.
The photographs of normal workers going about their daily life seem to be a slightly token inclusion, whereas they really have the potential to bring out a more interesting and varied side of the city.
The exhibition could have been made much more fully rounded through the inclusion of people from different areas of the city and from a wider range of ages. Although many of the photographs are slick and stylish, the exhibition as a whole lacks a certain substance.
Whilst the exhibition is worth a browse, it does not represent a truly “authentic slice of city life” — only a snapshot of the lives of certain residents of Manchester.
URBIS, Manchester
Cathedral Gardens, Manchester, M4 3BG, England
T: 0161 605 8200
Open: Open daily 10am - 6pm
Closed: Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Years Day.
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