Marco Bohr

Today Marco Bohr gave a brief hour speech into his photographic work from 2002 to recent. His speech was a vague talk on some of his work for the past 8years. He dipped into parts of his documentary work whilst clearly describing why,where and how he took his images. His work is mainly focusing on documenting the culture and the surrounding people in that culture and how we all do things a different way.

For example his series of work called 'No Ball Games' was a documentary series in Scotland focusing on the surrounding rural areas. He initially went their to shoot the landscape environment but soon realise that its not only just about the landscape, but the people within that landscape, and started to shoot the people in the streets on Scotland. He realised that he saw more kids than adults in this rural area of Scotland so decided to shoot the kids in the street, which gave me a reminisce sense of what I used to do as a child. His composition and camera skills are clearly seen here in these shots. His use of focusing and use of deep of field to focus on the actually subject matter rather than the surrounding areas is seen without his range of photos. Not only his he focusing on the actually subject but he is still able to keep the surrounding background in context. This body of work is my favourite pieces he showed throughout his talk. I loved how he conveyed his documentary idea in his work and the expression on the kids faces just show a deep meaningful sense of pure rural culture. Not only the faces but the clothes and character could be seen within the photographs.

The only other piece of work I found interesting from his speech was the 'Observatories' project he did in Japan. I loved how he purposely over exposed his images by a stop or two to blur out the actual landscape that all the 'observers' where looking at whilst actually focusing on the 'observers' observing. To me it looked comical as it looked as though all these people where just looking at white walls, when instead they where actually looking at a landscape from a tall building. He explained that the culture in Japan like to observe stuff and like to over look places from tall sky-scrapers. He discovered that 80% of all the sky-scrapers and tall buildings in Japan  had observatories in them, which is just a whole top floor dedicated to overlooking the surrounding area. Like previously said, I found this series slightly comical in the fact that they all looked as though they where all looking at white walls when in fact they are all observing the surrounding landscape. He did a series of these from different locations including tops of mountains and edges of the cliffs looking out to sea.

To sum up his work, I enjoyed the documentary in Scotland dearly and being a portraiture person myself I loved looking at his photographs. The way he photographed the kids from a low angle making them iconic structures and almost making them the rulers of rural Scotland in my mind made me laugh a little as he said he only saw kids and hardly any adults therefore the kids ruled the streets which they played on.