Manchester life through a lens

AN AMATEUR football match, flower sellers under a grey sky, neon lights on the curry mile – these are some of the images that were chosen to project the real Manchester to the rest of the world.

Rather than marketing images from tourist brochures these snapshots of life in the North West are the first glimpses of Manchester that international visitors see as they arrive in the city.

Taken by photography students here at Manchester Metropolitan University the jumbo-sized photos aim to capture the essence of the region and are now on display at Manchester Airport’s ‘Arrivals’ zones.

Photography lecturer Gavin Parry said: “The students responded magnificently to the brief, Manchester isn’t just about buildings, we wanted to get away from the typical shots of cathedrals and bridges and capture the essence of the city.”

New perspective

Hayley Slater-Ling a mature student from Sale said: “I’ve lived in Manchester all my life but before doing this project I’d never really thought about how the city would look and feel to other people, or how I would like to show it to visitors and what I would like to say about it.

“I was out in Manchester one night when I saw this amateur football game being played. I thought it would be a great way to reflect our awesome footballing heritage without mentioning City or United, and the Arndale provided a perfect, unmistakably Mancunian backdrop.”

Rose Gledhill, 23, who shot scenes of the Curry Mile at night added: “I lived in Rusholme for a while – it looks so appealing when it is all lit-up, I really wanted to capture the vibrancy of it and all the energy there at night, all concentrated in that one strip of town.”

Kitty Dunne, 23, snapped a series of glimpses through doorways for the project: “It’s the people that really make Manchester,” she says, “ I wanted to show people going about their everyday lives, as that for me is what living in this city is all about.”

Olympic audience

The photos are approximately 2 metres high and 5 metres wide. Julie Armstrong, customer services director for Manchester Airport, said: “We were very keen to transform the visual displays within the terminals, particularly in the run up to the Olympics when teams will be flying into training camps in the North West but also for the benefit of our regular customers.

“The photos that were chosen have enabled us to show off the very best of our region and gave some talented photographers from the local area an appropriate platform in which to show their work to large numbers of people.”

Withington lad Jonathon Beattie added: “This project was a great opportunity for us. It is fantastic to get our work seen by so many people and being from Manchester myself it’s also nice for me to be able to show people my city.”

The photographs are now on permanent display in the arrivals piers in Terminal 1. It is hoped that this project will be the first in a series of collaborations between the university and the airport with an exhibition planned for August 2012.