Amanda Taylor, a London-based English teacher, is behind the hashtag #peoplewalkingpastwalls. Since she started it five years ago, more than 90,000 photos of strangers walking city streets have been shared by Instagrammers across the world.
“Aesthetically, there’s something really appealing about combining a wall, whether it be plain, colourful, covered in street art or a strong architectural structure, with a person in the foreground with a good stride.”
Larson, Naomi, “Side effect: why people walking past walls is an Instagram hit” The Guardian, available at:
Ellingham, a creative based in Tokyo, came to photography while travelling through northern Japan shortly after it was devastated by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Volunteering in the town of Otsuchi-Cho in Iwate, he was moved to capture on camera the foundations of buildings and towns that had been exposed in the disaster and streets that no longer existed. Shooting with a Sony a7RII camera fitted with specialist architectural lenses, he began sharing his work on Instagram as @cbje_tokyo in earnest in 2016.
Since then, Ellingham has moved to exploring other facets of the urban experience, including Japanese public housing in his series Danchi Dreams and the night-time neon lights of some of the world’s high-tech megacities in Derive. He finds his subject matters by exploring places on foot and without a map, aiming to flow through a city by following streets and paths that catch his attention.
His favourite city to shoot so far is Shanghai, he says, with the skyscrapers, infrastructure, art and culture combining to create an inspiring vision of the world to come. “I only spent four days there, but in that time I felt like I had seen the future.”
Hunt Elle, “I felt like I had seen the future’: capturing east Asian megacities”, The Guardian, available at:
On Instagram, Christopher Moloney shows us where cinema and the city meet. A writer and cinephile, he juxtaposes scenes from classic films with the places as they exist today. “There’s a cliche that often ‘the location’ is a character in a movie – my favourite films tend to be the movies where that’s true,” he says. “Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen’s early films are very New York. Alexander Payne really loves Nebraska. John Hughes loves Chicago.
“It’s really more about the movies for me. It still puts a smile on my face to see a scene I’ve loved ‘come to life’.”
Hunt Elle (2018) “The location is a character’: where cinema meets the city”, The Guardian, available at:
Hundreds of thousands of people have shared striking floor designs – sometimes from unusual places. From brightly patterned tiles to intricate mosaics, sometimes beauty is right under our feet.
Instagrammers have shared photos of eye-catching floors using the #ihavethisthingwithfloors hashtag. Featuring striking geometric designs, positive affirmations and colourful bricks, they reveal that attractive floors can appear in some pretty unlikely places.
Campbell Lucy (2019) “What lies beneath: the craze for ‘selfeets’ of eye-catching floors”, The Guardian, available at:
Rodríguez, V; Fortuna, C (2020) Post-photographic images of the night in Mexico City’s Historic Downtown Voices of Mexico, CISAN-UNAM (July)No 111, p. 72-75
Abstract:
From its beginnings, photography has documented the material and sociocultural dimensions of cities. The use of the flash, filters, and other analog camera accessories allowed for greater proximity to parts of nightlife. Today, smartphones, with their cameras and web apps, make it possible for digital images to multiply in virtual space. They are making it easier and more and more common to capture our sojourns through the city. We are witnessing the arrival of what Joan Fontcuberta called “post-photography,” 1 that is, the production of digital images with new technological communication devices that make it possible for photographs to circulate in the net’s virtual space in a matter of seconds. Instagram is one of the most commonly used communications networks for the exchange of images and messages. Its users can send out photos in seconds, edit them with app “filters,” add key words, and indicate the place where the image was taken. The post-photographic images of the urban night on this platform reveal the lighting, the multiple rhythms, and the social relations created there.