In photography, chance is often the overlooked understudy of talent. New Yorker Brett Beyer embraces this philosophy with his New Amsterdam project. Shooting lower Manhattan with a Holga and a Zeiss Nettar, he invites flaws and doubles exposures and then reshapes the results.
Beyer chooses these more eccentric cameras specifically for their light leaks and focusing problems. "These errors," he says, "allow chance into the process and give me results I never would have intentionally gotten."
The New Amsterdam images are collages assembled in-camera through overlapping the exposures and manually advancing the film. Beyer prefers these techniques to creating the effects digitally as the analog eccentricities surpass what one could emulate on a computer. This visual free association captures yet another side of one of the world's most photographed cities.
Read on to see more of Beyer's work and take a look behind the scenes of a DIY Manhattan photography project.
Photo: Brett Beyer
Not satisfied with just film collages, Beyer projects the New Amsterdam images onto sheets of paper and draws over them with expressionistic line sketches and child-like spasms of color – leaving yet another abstract cityscape permutation on the canvas below.
Intrigued by these layers of process, Beyer adds yet another. Repurposing a Canon 5D Mark II for its video rather than stills, Beyer films himself adding the drawing layer to the images. He then encourages others to (to view) download and remix the video online.
"I had originally started making time lapse videos with my Canon G9," he says. "It makes sense that I would eventually be drawn to video since most of my photographs relate to motion and time."
Photo: Brett Beyer
It's hard to say whether the number of moving parts to this project is inspiring or daunting. But Beyer is trying to create something alive and participatory, which comes with the price of giving up a clear focus.
"I want to see the work live on and become something new. So much of what is interesting in culture nowadays relates to the remix, mashups and cross-cultural experimentation. You can see that in the music of Girl Talk, the artwork of Shephard Fairey, and countless video re-mixes on YouTube. I want to tap into this and see what comes out of it."
Photo: Brett Beyer
From the beginning of his career Beyer wasn't as interested in capturing a moment in time as forcing time to conform to his wishes, a tinkering that continues today.
His first assignment had him taking a 15 minute exposure of the night sky, causing the stars to streak across the image. "This idea," says Beyer, "of the camera being able to condense time into a single moment has stuck with me ever since."
Photo: Brett Beyer
After his formal education in France, Beyer traveled for two years through the western United States, crashing on couches and picking up odd jobs. "During that time I worked in a photo lab, a steel fabrication shop, doing hiking trail maintenance ... and I had my own show on a pirate radio station in Santa Cruz."
His extended vagrancy forced him to abandon his initial artistic focus on sculpture and metalworking and concentrate instead on the more portable art of photography. Beyer's background in sculpture couldn't help but inform his approach to photography.
"When I would work with steel, he says "I was constantly building, tearing apart and rebuilding the structures I made. I look at light, film and cameras as materials in my process."
Photo: Brett Beyer
After returning to the East Coast nearly a decade ago, Beyer found employment as a staff photographer for an art and antiques dealer. In his off hours he freelanced shooting live shows.
Currently Beyer supplies real estate clients with architectural interior shots, a task which formed the genesis of his New Amsterdam Project.
"I'm thinking about the urban landscape and trying to visually reinvent it," he says. "I see it as a way to visually re-mix and reflect the vibrancy of the city."
Photo: Brett Beyer
In keeping with his ideology of reshaping, reworking and reinventing, Beyer wants to publicly display his pieces in the streets using a video projector to create a mobile gallery show.
As for a formal showing of his pieces, Beyer is "not approaching galleries but I am not ruling that out for the future."
New Amsterdam will be projected throughout New York beginning mid-October. Be sure to check Brett Beyer's blog for scheduled times and places. Beyer is also working on publishing a collection of New Amsterdam photos, due out this coming winter.
Photo: Brett Beyer
