Searching for Gotham in Disneyland, Academic
I completed this project over three months while studying at Cooper Union in NYC, inspired (or uninspired?)
by what I found to be a sanitized version of the city I expected. This project is my attempt to create images of
a city closer to the one I hoped to find; gritty, bleak, and dangerous. By enlarging Super8 negatives to 30x40,
film grain is enlarged to the point that the photograph begins to represent a pointilist painting. The extremely
low resolution of the film, combined with the familiar colour reproduction of Super8 (with its nostalgic, home-
movie connotations) result in images that have the cinematic quality of my imagined Manhattan. The final
enlargements, process prints and the uneditied Super8 film were displayed as part of the Advanced Photo
exhibition at Cooper Union in December 2006.