„Tokyo Blue“ (working title)

Markus Seidl 2003/04

Linear Panorama 15m * 1,27m colorprint on Durst Lambda


this is the right half of the panorama. the rest is not finished yet.

deutsche version

tokyo can be seen as a number of cities, connected via metro and railway.

the sumida river flows through the city from a to b, and meets the sea in the tokyo bay.

one enters the city from asakusa station and a black monolith with a golden top draws the attention. the asahi brewery designed by phillip starck.
if one is able to avert his eyes from this building and has a look down onto the riverside of the sumida river, a number of blue objects is seen. those objects are the homes of homeless people, put together from scrap and made waterproof with blue foil.

i take the homelessness and reduce it to a aesthetic phenomenon.
the question why those people are homeless is secondary, more important is the question why all the foil is blue?

there have been several photographic comments to this topic, but none of them has been showing the phenomenon in its broad local context.

comment: this example picture is cut at the left side and is showing about half of the final product.

original height: 127 cm. the picture is blurred due to the jpeg compression. scroll to the right!

the red marked selection from the pic above, about half the scale of the final product:

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although this picture gives the opposite impression it leaves the picture space that is photographically viewable.
unlike classical panoramas, for which all segments are taken from one position, for this linear panorama all the segments are taken from different locations parallel to the image plane.
the resulting parallax problems (only for one plane - in this case the riverside - the segments can be mounted correctly) are ignored by crossfading for the foreground (the water).
the background, the tokyo skyline, is assembled true to reality with the techniques of montage and retouching.
this montage is possible because the raw slides have huge overlapping areas. the example above consists of about 90 images.
in this example the montage of the background is not done yet.
the material is photographed with a crispsharp 105mm lense on 35mm small grain slide film. the final product which will be shot in februar 2004 will be with a 150mm lense on Medium Format (6*4,5cm) small grain slide film. in the final product which will be very sharp with a lot of details. a human will have approx. 3,5cms of height.

the picture will be 15 meters by 1,27 meters. the background (the houses) will be true to reality, done by time consuming montage.

Markus Seidl 11/03