Author: nakedcitiesjournal

Naked Cities Journal attempts to bring together a number of passions that have captivated me over a lifetime: a love of exploring the urban landscape and its extraordinarily diverse range of places and spaces; a love of journeys both internal and external; a love of keeping writer’s notebooks; and a love of Urban Studies an intellectual discipline – Marcus D. Niski
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On Neon Signs

By Marcus D. Niski

There is something elegant and peculiarly captivating about neon signs: they have a certain memorizing quality about them no matter how seemingly mundane their messages might be.

My earliest memory of a viewing my first neon sign was that of the ‘The Skipping Girl’ one of Melbourne’s most famous visual landmarks – in reality an elaborate promotional sign for a brand of table vinegar – located along Victoria Street, Abbotsford in the city’s inner suburbs.

While always very low key about it, my father in fact spent some of his early working life in Australia as a graphic designer of neon signs designing several landmark signs as well as later printing light box signage for national advertisers.

Many years ago in the 1990s whilst living in Sydney, I took this photograph of the St James Station entrance located on the northern side of Hyde Park. It has always remained one of my favorite photographs of neons given the electric blue and red hue set against the mundane entrance to one of Sydney’s famous inner-city stations.

stjames1995mn-e1510181640331.jpg Image © Marcus D. Niski 1995-2017

Melbourne’s famous ‘Skipping Girl’ landmark:

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Finding the Structure of the World

… I’m thinking structures. I’ve always taken it for granted that in literary writing content and form are intertwined, one. Now I’m examining my belief. Iain says that the writer is a person who finds, rather than makes, structures. “I began to see the pattern of the living city in myth,” he tells me. “If you look, you can see the structures that lie underneath.”

“Is this how we write? By seeing? By finding?” “I think so.”

“Then, to write an epic is to see the structure of one’s city or of one’s life as epic?” …

 

Extracted from: Ian Sinclair an Interview with Kathy Acker in – ‘Writing as Magic in London in Its Summer: Iain Sinclair and the Crafting of Place.’

Read the full interview at: https://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/vertigo_magazine/volume-4-issue-3-summer-2009/writing-as-magic-in-london-in-its-summer/

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Street Photography Samples. Gospel Singing — The Street Photographer’s Guide

If there’s one thing I find hard to ignore it’s a beautiful voice, and when it rings out in a city’s darkness it’s even more evocative. Scenes like these build up your portfolio so don’t forget to stop and take in the beauty and the skill of these aural performers. Try and capture how people […]

via Street Photography Samples. Gospel Singing — The Street Photographer’s Guide