Photographer Sohei Nishino pieces together a collage of over 20,000 photographs to create a view of the city of Dundee never seen before.
V&A Dundee commissioned Nishino to create an artwork that would illustrate the city of Dundee in his unique style of a vast collage. By walking through the city with his camera he captured his experience of it in black and white, and the result is a five-meter wide diorama that displays many significant features of the city, combined and presented in a giant vista of the Scottish city.
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Nishino is a renowned photographer who captures cities around the world with abstract and highly detailed collages. His previous works have included capturing Tokyo, Berlin, Amsterdam, Jerusalem, plus many other major regions. Nishino explores the city with a camera taking photographs from each part before stepping back and combining them as part of a map, placing each image in the approximate location where he shot it.
Nishino says, "I put together on various canvases all the 'fragments' that I have captured, so as to reconstruct my memories to enable myself to render into images the specificity of the respective cities and the appearance of 'the present' whose glimpse the cities have given me. By doing so, I try to express again the geographical representations by using the photographs that have captured the specific things and events that are completely different from the symbolic representations on maps. This is my attempt to express the appearance of the cities by integrating my personal experiences and memories. What results is not at all a map to convey precise information, but the record of how I, as a human being, have walked through their streets and how I looked at those streets".
Video (above): watch Nishino compiling his image from thousands of individual prints
After capturing Dundee, Nishino returned to Japan where he spent weeks constructing the artwork and using around 20,000 photographs to do so. Included in the piece are historical sites, local landmarks, and the people who call Dundee home.
Nishino said: "Dundee is the smallest city I have worked in, but the final result was bigger than many of the other cities because I focused more on the people and events. If you look at a city from a bird's eye view, it will just flow by you, by walking and exploring together with local people, I believe I was able to create a work that captures the landscape from multiple points of view."
The piece is called Diorama Map Dundee and is part of a new exhibition at the V&A Dundee titled Photo City: How Images Shape the Urban World which runs until October 20, 2024.
