Urban Landscapes

Photographs by Joseph Ford, Max Forsythe, Christoph Morlinghaus, Pete Seaward and Morgan Silk

6 September to 16 October 2005

Online gallery

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Christoph Morlinghaus

Pete Seaward

Joseph Ford

Max Forsythe

Morgan Silk

Cities dominate our lives. As people continue to flood into cities abandoning the countryside for the economic lure that city life can offer, so more and more the landscape of our 21st century existence is an urban one.

Cities can excite, inspire and terrify the people who come to dwell in them. They offer the chance to make fortunes or to shatter dreams – bringing people closer together at the same time as making them feel more apart.

Our cities shape our lives and our world, but they also reflect the best and worst that modern mankind represents – its towering achievements: the great buildings and beautiful parks – and its greatest follies: sprawling housing estates and eight-lane motorways. All the best and worst ideas that man has to offer all existing cheek by jowl. If God invented man, then man invented the city.

The city has been a central character in all of the 20th century's great arts forms – in film, music, literature and art, but perhaps it is with photography that the city has found the medium that captures it best – a true mirror that tells us as much about our own perception of the city as about the city itself.

Urban Landscapes features the work of five photographers whose work captures very different viewpoints of contemporary city life – from the innate romance of a city like Paris to the architectural beauty of New York to the people-less, car-filled streets of Los Angeles.

Christoph Morlinghaus is a German photographer exhibiting in the UK for the first time. Based in New York, his work captures the cities of LA and New York at their most fundamental and representative. New York is rendered in mighty towers vying for space like trees competing for light, LA a series of arteries pumping cars in and out of its heart.

The scale of the work mirrors the size of the cities the photographs capture – vast, industrial man-made landscapes. The photographs capture their subjects in almost intimate detail – hyper-real images of familiar landscapes, made almost unreal in their calculated formalism and eerily empty composition.

Pete Seaward began his career as a graphic designer, but has spent the last twenty as a photographer. Originally studio-based, he has become a specialist landscape photographer. Working primarily in advertising, commissions have taken him across the world, creating campaigns for clients such as Singapore Airlines, the New Zealand Tourist Board and the German Stock Exchange.

These commissions have allowed him to develop and create a personal body of work on the theme of the Cityscape. The work captures the world's greatest modern capital cities from Tokyo and London to New York and Paris at their iconic best. Illuminated at night, from a bird's eye viewpoint or through a rain-soaked pane of glass, each image tells a different story of the city it captures and ably illustrates the powerful and magnetic lure of the modern city.

Joseph Ford is a young photographer with a growing reputation both for his commercial and personal work. From photography stock (his father is the well known advertising photographer Graham Ford), his natural ability to glimpse and capture something unusual and surprising in ordinary and mundane city streets in Brussels and Coimbra in Portugal, demonstrates a true artist's eye.

His work has been exhibited in Paris and London and a commission from the Foreign & Commonwealth Office to celebrate the centenary of the Entente Cordiale in 2004 saw his work exhibited at the British Ambassador's Residence in Paris.

Max Forsythe began his career as an Art Director before switching to photography. Since then he has worked mainly in advertising specialising in location and reportage photography. He has shot campaigns for many international clients from Nike to Rolls Royce and has won awards for his work including four D&AD Silvers and a Bronze Lion at Cannes. His work is in the collection of the Royal Photographic Society and the National Museum of Photography. His most recent body of work, 'Drive By Shooting' has been exhibited in London and has been published in a book.

Morgan Silk has been involved in creating photographic images for the last 20 years. He began his career as a creative retoucher working alongside photographers for advertising clients, and is now a highly successful photographer in his own right. His major commercial clients include Land Rover and he has recently won an Association of Photographer's Gold Award for his highly acclaimed project Zoo.

Urban Landscapes at Crane Kalman Brighton runs from 6 September to 16 October. For any further information or imagery, please contact Richard Kalman on 01273 697096 or richard.kalman@cranekalmanbrighton.com.

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