photography, planning, and design are better together.

Personal Statement

A flaneur at heart, Shravanthi loves pondering the hows and whys of cities. After practicing as an architect, she pivoted towards urban planning, combining her interest in the built environment with her passion for natural landscapes. Inspired by her father’s film archives, she experiments with digital and analogue photography in her quest to capture the beauty of cities.

When did you start taking photos?

My journey began probably a little over a decade ago, when I was in college studying architecture (wow, I feel old!). I started experimenting with photography when I got my first DSLR which was a hand-me-down from my older brother. Everything became a subject - streets, buildings, landscapes, people, my dogs, all dogs.

A few years later when I unearthed my father’s Nikon F3 film camera from the 80’s, I spent some time learning about film photography and how to develop my own film. I’ve been fascinated with film ever since. It’s such a great medium!

What are your favorite scenes or places to photograph?

It’s definitely hard to pick just one! Markets have been a favourite, wherever I have traveled. There’s so much to capture within these spaces, so much activity, so many stories. It’s tough though, to hang around and photograph people without making them uncomfortable but once you engage with them, that changes.

I also like to photograph public spaces and buildings (that’s definitely the architect in me!). I am fascinated with historic buildings and their surroundings. The detailing, the textures, the stories that those walls must have heard! Photographing buildings/structures for me has always been a great way to dive into the stories behind them.

How does photography help you see the built environment differently?

Photography has made me appreciate a lot about the built environment. There is so much complexity and so many layers that make up an urban setting. Activity, texture, light, color; to decide what to capture makes me pause and take in as much as I can. A lot of times when I go back and look at a photograph, I notice something that I hadn’t while taking it.

How does photography influence your planning work?

It's definitely an area that I am exploring how the two can fit together. Photography can be a powerful tool to capture the character of spaces and bring to light someone else’s perspective of a space. I’m excited to use photography in the planning field to further explore how we inhabit spaces and how it’s changing.

What is the story behind your exhibit?

During my time at planning school I did a good amount of research on planning issues in Bangalore and the planning issues it faces. There has been a lot written about this in recent years. While it's important to call these issues out, I wanted to take this opportunity to reflect on what makes the essence of the city. I also took it as an opportunity to show people what I love about the city.

These photos celebrate the beauty in everyday city life and shine a spotlight on how cities shape and are shaped by the history and culture of the people who live and make a living there. I’d like to inspire people to pause and take in what surrounds them.

What do you hope viewers will see in the photos of your exhibit?

For people unfamiliar with Bangalore, I hope that my photographs can be a virtual window into the city. For people who know Bangalore, I hope that the exhibit brings up fond memories of the city.

I’ve never called photography my ‘work’, it has always been a hobby, so I’m both nervous and excited by this opportunity. I really like that all the exhibitor’s different styles of photography are on one platform. It's interesting to me that some of us might have a similar intent but totally different approaches to capturing a photograph.

Personal Statement

Yeana is an ORISE research fellow at the U.S. EPA’s Urban Waters Program. She received her MCP in 2020 where she studied land use and environmental planning in addition to urban resilience. She considers herself a novice photographer but has long believed that photography is a powerful storytelling tool.

When did you start taking photos?

I didn’t really start taking photos until middle school when my family bought our first compact point-and-shoot digital camera. I have a strong sense of nostalgia and often poured over old family photos and films growing up. So as digital cameras became more accessible and made it easy to store seemingly infinite number of photos for free, I became obsessed with capturing every moment that felt worth remembering and would take hundreds of shots at a time. I think the quality (and quantity) of my photos started to evolve as I discovered National Geographic magazines and began to recognize the power of photography to tell stories and transport you to a different part of the world.

What are your favorite scenes or places to photograph?

I find that most of my photos are of scenic landscapes, portraits of people I love, or cinematic moments where an unfolding story is captured in that split-second frame. I don’t necessarily seek out places to photograph all the time but rather use photography as a tool to capture the awe or authenticity of a moment to be remembered forever. If I do have a camera on hand for a specific project or a site visit, I try to take photos of people interacting with the site to contextualize or ground truth the research that is usually done before hand.

How does photography help you see the built environment differently?

Photography helps me notice and appreciate the details of the built environment around me. For an example, you really appreciate how monumental something is when you’re on the floor trying to fit the subject into a frame! Pausing to capture a moment in time and having to be selective with what fits in the frame really forces one to consider all the spatial elements that might otherwise go unnoticed just passing through a space. In this way, photography encourages me to interact with physical spaces and people more intentionally because it requires one to have an observant eye for how one interacts with the built environment.

How does photography influence your planning work?

In photography, how you frame and edit a photo can completely change the story that gets told. There’s a sense of responsibility that I feel, particularly when photographing strangers, to honor people and their lived experiences.

I think one could say I take a sort of ethnographic approach to photography. The ethics I adhere to when taking photos as an outsider in communities for projects translates to my approach as a planner.

In both photography and planning, I think it’s important not to be intrusive and disruptive but rather be committed to having a deep respect for the people, their lived experiences, and being honest about the challenges they face without exploitation. If people around me are notably uncomfortable or confused by my presence I’ve learned to just put the camera down and not force a photo- no matter how much potential there is for a great shot. I think this patience and iterative approach to relationship or trust building is important for planning and engagement processes too.

What is the story behind your exhibit?

One of the most fascinating things I came to realize during planning school was the fact that there is no singular agreed upon definition for the term ‘urban’ across the world. Depending on your concentration, a planner’s philosophy to what characterizes or is essential to a city will differ from the next planner.

My exhibit is a broad philosophical question. What IS urban? There are plenty of well-studied urban theories that make sense of the demographic, economic, and environmental forces that shape urban environments. Meanwhile planning theories identify what we can and should do to intervene and intentionally shape our urban areas in beneficial ways.

My exhibit simply takes out the academic jargon of urban and planning theory and attempts to highlight the actual lived experiences of different urban realities and elements around the world.

What do you hope viewers will see in the photos of your exhibit?

I hope the audience will see that I am not trying to place value on a particular type of city. There are always tradeoffs in city planning. That’s where I try to challenge the viewer on their assumptions of what makes a city ‘good.’

One value I do present, however, is that the best cities are the ones built for people, not for profit or to compete in an economy. Some photos depict a livelier scene than others. What brings a city to life? Can it be curated?

Jane Jacobs famously compared cities to an ecosystem that cannot be forced and she championed community-based approaches to city building. However, her scathing criticism of high rises presents a challenge when considering that over 60% of the global population will live in cities by 2050 while the space and capacity to grow our cities is increasingly strained and limited. If high density is our future, how must we reimagine city life as we know it?

If nothing else, I hope people appreciate the diversity of cities around the world and are challenged to think about urbanity in new ways.

Personal Statement

Allison has been experimenting with film since middle-school when she salvaged her dad’s Pentax camera. In college, she started exploring multiple exposure techniques on film while visiting family in Hong Kong. Allison’s appreciation for cities and analog photography is a source of inspiration for her double exposure shots.

When did you start taking photos?

I found an old film camera in the house one summer, some time in middle school. I started playing around with it - I remember liking how heavy it felt in my hands, it felt like I had found a piece of treasure. It cured my boredom that summer.

Since then I’ve had relatives pass down a few old cameras for me to use. I enjoy taking my time with them, learning how each camera works, appreciating the varying tones in each exposure. The process of shooting film, to me, is rewarding.

What are your favorite scenes or places to photograph?

That’s hard for me to answer, difficult to pinpoint. Maybe on both ends of the spectrum - I enjoy taking pictures in a chaotic space with people and many lines, shapes, and diagonals to consider.

I also like taking pictures in nature because of its inherent solitude and space, such as a body of water and its iridescent quality that either blends with or absorbs the layering exposures. Both scenes feel expansive to me but in different ways.

How does photography help you see the built environment differently?

I think that it has helped me become more aware and appreciative of the visual diversity of certain built environments, and how that subsequently invites more activity from different sources. A big swath of monolith building fronts that runs down the entire stretch of the block neither engages the eye nor encourages interaction that may otherwise fill the scene.

Shooting on film also requires a degree of intentionality, which forces me to examine the subject, or built environment, more closely. It also makes me pay more attention to light and how the built environment tends to create these pockets of darkness among brightness...the contrast is stark - it adds to the visual diversity.

How does photography influence your planning work?

As much as I love working with maps and being in the “bird’s-eye view”, walking around and taking photos reminds me that the real experience is, and has always been, on the ground. I’ve found that when traditional planning practices (from a land-use focus) overvalue the plan/site perspective when working alongside communities, the resulting solutions tend to overlook and dismiss the local experience.

I think that photography, specifically urban and street photography in the context of city planning, has the potential to be integrated into the planning process to make it a much more holistic and fulfilling approach.

What is the story behind your exhibit?

The photos in the exhibit are a compilation of double and multi-exposures that I have taken over the years, from 2015 through 2020. When I show the photos to friends and family, each person has a different visual interpretation of the photo - sometimes they point out objects or scenes I have not even noticed. The interaction is eye-opening and rewarding. I’d like to encourage more of that. I set the scene with a few lines of text, poems, giving a few details of how I experienced the place while taking the photo.

What do you hope viewers will see in the photos of your exhibit?

I think I’m excited about the online platform of this exhibit - it’s accessible and allows for people to go at their own pace. I like the idea that people can take their time looking at the photos, maybe find an element that is interesting or amusing to them. My hope is that this exhibit can bring about curiosity for our surroundings and built environment.

Personal Statement

Tobin is a planner, urban designer, and founder of 7521. Tobin’s exploration of the built environment through his camera informs his work as a planner and brings him closer to aspects that make every place special. Regardless if it’s global or local travels, he reveals stories with his camera that he wants to share with the world.

When did you start taking photos?

I have had a fascination with taking photos since I was a child. I will admit my early photos of school field trips were not very interesting to look at, but I was always rolling the dice with those wind-up disposable cameras!

Many of the photos captured friends being goofy, but the other portion of the photos were always of different aspects of the places I visited. Through practice, I learned that, like any good story, photos need an interesting beginning, middle, and end.

What are your favorite scenes or places to photograph?

My favorite places to photograph are urban spaces throughout any city. If I am to get specific, I really enjoyed photographing Seoul. It served as a double purpose for myself because, as a Korean adoptee, I tried to better understand aspects of myself through understanding aspects of the city and the people in the city.

A photo that stands out is when I visited Changdeokgung Palace. The photo was taken outside of Injeongmun Gate and reveals layers of architecture and generations of Koreans, including the watchful eye of a father over his two boys walking around the paths of the gate. The palace is a historic landmark and a local park where history and modernity exist together, which was a powerful experience to observe.

How does photography help you see the built environment differently?

It wasn’t until I traveled to Nairobi, Kenya in 2014 that I realized photos can tell stories of the built environment. The photos from that trip partly served as a memory bank for all the places I visited and friends I met.

The photos also served as a means for telling a story to family and friends with a different point of view than what we see in Western media. The stories I gathered through photos were ones of hope, vibrancy, and rapid change. These stories were not meant to replace other stories but to add to the tapestry of our understanding of place and people in the city.

Since then, I seek out a narrative of a place as I’m exploring it. The photos I take are an expression of that narrative.

How does photography influence your planning work?

Photography plays a major part of my planning work. Photos provide community context, capture the planning and design process, and provide image references for planning interventions.

Photos are a powerful visual for community members to recognize features in their community and to talk about them. It is much more difficult to connect with people over aerials or maps because most people do not think of their communities from an aerial or bird’s eye perspective. However, when you can use photos taken from a human perspective of local places, it can quickly connect a person to a spot on a map.

What is the story behind your exhibit?

The idea for my exhibit, Listen, started with my thoughts on hyper-realistic renderings and the portrayal of a place yet to be realized. Perceived motions of people in the scenes give our minds clues as to what activities happen within these spaces. However, renderings, no matter how real they appear, match their realized counterparts. That’s because there are other external factors such as sound, weather, and the surrounding built environment that affect our perception of the finished result.

I decided to explore sounds further because, like perceived motions of people, sound also creates perceptions. By better exploring and understanding the sounds of the existing built environment, how might that influence planning and design projects? That is the question that guided the formation of my exhibit.

What do you hope viewers will see in the photos of your exhibit?

I hope viewers will listen to the built environment more closely the next time they step outside their home. Sounds influence our perception of space more than we may realize and it is critical that we consider sounds when working with communities or clients on planning and design projects.

My exhibit does not propose specific actions for incorporating sounds into the planning and design process, but I hope this exhibit can get more people to think about this aspect of the built environment.