Godfrey Reggio’s movie, “Koyaanisqatsi”, was something I held close to when deciding the theme and overall aesthetic for my photobook. While not a movie, I tried to make my photobook almost replicate the same elements from Koyaanisqatsi. These involved camera positions, angles, luminosity, different timeframes and locations and most importantly the subject of each photograph.

During my night photography photoshoots, I wanted to capture the glows of the street lights, inside or outside the frame to capture the presence of mankind, even when the streets are empty and deserted. The photographs with cars were also attempting this. Because I couldn’t shoot a video time-lapse, I instead made a photo-equivalent one by capturing the moving lights of cars with the open shutter on my camera, these were also to capture the luminosity of the late night roads and I believe they really did capture the same elements that Reggio’s movie had.

Comparison –

In my day/evening photos I wanted to also involve views from higher places showing big parts of towns and cities just like in the movie, also the lower from-the-ground views of the buildings above on the busy roads. Most of the ones I did had amazing skies too so I involved the many different colours in the skies to add as my own thing to further enhance the overall image.

Comparison –

Reggio’s:

Mine:

In conclusion, I think I did a decent job of replicating themes from Koyaanisqatsi over to my photobook. The overall essence of the movie, I believe, is very present within a large portion of my images and I am very satisfied with my work. In addition, the quality of my photos, I couldn’t be any happier with, especially the sky images with their stunning colours and lighting. They all look professional and cinematic, which was another theme I wanted to target, cinematic photos. The idea of these images, day and night were under the “Observation” topic, as they are observing these areas. The meaning of these images and photobook was to simply show nice cinematic photos and to view Jersey at different times of day.