Cartography

I've long held a personal interest in maps, owning several books on map-making as an art form and trying to work out how to incorporate maps into my own art practice as well as introduce the form into student work.

I've long been interested in maps and illustration, particularly the Dell Map-back mystery series from the 40s and 50s which are still available to collectors today. The American series of pulp fiction books by Dell Books carried out an exceptional line of detective story books featuring maps of murder-mystery crime scenes, illustrated as floor plans, building diagrams and city layouts on the back covers. A total of 577 ‘Map Backs’ were published during the lifespan of the series, from 1943 to 1952.

A few years ago I bought You are Here: (Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination) - Katherine Harmon's brilliant book about the map as art form and a delight and inspiration-filled book.

So its with interest I discovered the diorama work of Japanese photographer, Sohei Nisheno. One of the rising stars of the contemporary Japanese photography, 28-year old Sohei Nishino’s extraordinary work is monumental in scope, size and detail, mapping out his personal impression of the world’s major cities. These intimately detailed collages are an imperfect mix of landmarks and iconic features conceived from his personal ‘re-experiencing’ of a city, and similar to David Hockney's Drawings with a Camera only city map-based in their subject matter.

Over 3 months, 4,000 photographs were selected, hand printed and painstakingly put together with scissors and glue.

Burn brightly, Pete