PHOTOGRAPHY | INTENTIONAL CAMERA MOVEMENT

City Expression

Constructing a sense of place

Lost and forgotten functions. Photo by author.

Sense of place is important in storytelling. It’s not essential for all stories, since a story can rely on the absence of a sense of place, so to speak. But mostly, we story consumers like to have a feeling of the place. Many movies rely on well-known landmarks to fast ingrain that sense of place in us, like the New York skyline, the Eiffel Tower, or the steep roads of San Francisco. Even if we haven’t been there, we have seen enough movies to feel the place.

The same can be true for photographers telling a story through images. If there are no well-known landmarks, we can construct a sense of place as an archetypal city, with its lights, noises, and hustle.

A great example of such storytelling is Alexey Titarenko’s photography book “City of Shadows” from the early nineties, where he, by the use of a stationary camera and long exposures, gives us a strong sense of a city with a lot of people and life.

The lights and hustle of a big city. Photo by author.

Another method to obtain a similar sense of place is by the use of ICM. This can help us construct the sense of an archetypal large city by obscuring the concrete artefacts and giving a sense of movement, like in the photo above.

Life, music, and colors. Photo by author.

Further, the sense of city life can be reinforced by the photo above. The rich red color with lights forming hearts and the frequency-based structure of the photo obtained through the use of ICM add notions of life, easy living and music.

Music is tightly connected with large cities, and the connection can also be made without ICM. In the photo below, a range of guitars in a shop selling musical instruments combined with the glass mirroring a cityscape with buildings and a car shout the story.

Music and city. Photo by author.

Life, hustle, noise, and music are important, but paramount important are people. Cities are filled with them, and they almost crave to be included. We should take them on the word.

People are hustling and bustling in the city. Photo by author.

Sense of place, one of the strong ingredients in storytelling, can be made in many ways, whether it’s by use of ICM, a stationary camera with long exposures, or normal photography. The places can be whatever the photographer decides, being a city, the rural countryside, or more specific places, and it supports the many other storytelling tools available to us.

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© Asger Søndergård Olesen, 2026. All rights reserved. This is my original work. Medium is granted permission to display it solely on this platform. No part of it may be reproduced, copied, stored, distributed, or used in any form by any other party without my prior written consent.