MIDDLE LANE
BY JAN PIOTROWICZ
Jan Piotrowicz is an urban landscape and architecture photographer based in Manchester, UK. Piotrowicz is soon-to-be photography graduate. In his work, city as a subject and issues of urban space and planning are critical and most prominent features. In his work is present a constant inquest into those domains. Other inspirations include psychogeography and topography as the modes of exploring and responding to the urban environment. "La beauté est dans la rue".
Piotrowicz is obsessed with a notion of space and my photography is an attempt to capture it. He believes that the places people live in tell more about them than any portrait would ever do. With a little background in urban planning, He tries to seek for areas where urban meets nature, where ugliness unites with beauty. He constantly try to give places a new meaning. Piotrowicz believes that the public keeps many secrets to be revealed.
synopsis
In 2007, Professor Danny Dorling from University of Sheffield made an attempt to measure and map English national stereotype: the myth of the North and South differences. Can something so vague can be presented as a specific geographical feature on a map? A line was created, spreading from North-East regions of Lincolnshire down to the South-Western county of Gloucestershire. The line seems to be not only an artificial border between the two distinctive areas; it also runs diagonally across the whole Midlands and beyond. The project is about materializing that line. 25 towns and villages were picked with the strict rule: the border needs to fall directly on them. By playing a reversed connect-the-dots game, the journey plan was established. Each single picture is an attempt to seek identity: North, South or maybe Mid? The line acted as the guide in search of the default, generic England, free of the stereotypes and divisions.
Editor´s note
The presented project was selected from a spontaneous submission made by Jan Piotrowicz.