Photographer Christopher Porter is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. From the project ‘Urbania 1990-present’. To see Christopher ’s body of work, click on any photograph.

Urbania is an ongoing project that spans forty years that looks at how people inhabiting urban space. Made across cities on five continents, the work is less concerned with place or time, than with presence. These are photographs of people within the flow of everyday life, often moments of quiet interiority that unfold in public. They consider the intersection between how people shape and are shaped by their environments, where together and separate, aware and anonymous, exist side by side. The collection forms a continuum that reflects on what connects us across cultures and generations and how we see, or fail to see, each other.

Artist Statement

Seeing has shaped my entire life. In my career as a photographer, lighting director and director of photography—image and narrative have always been an inseparable part of me. But photography was how I encountered the world, and how I encountered myself within it.

When I photograph people, I work with available light and a 35mm lens, which requires me to step in close and be seen, yet gives me the depth of field that enables me to frame the individual within their surroundings. I’m interested in how people adapt, shape, and are shaped by the place they inhabit. I compose edge to edge and don’t alter the image later. I want to preserve what I saw and felt in that moment. Each project determines the choice of camera, format, and whether I shoot in black & white or colour. This is an emotional decision influenced by place, light, rhythm, history, and feel of an environment.

I’m drawn to quiet, ordinary moments of daily life that often pass unnoticed. I’m interested in the subtle tension between connectedness and solitude, belonging and displacement, intimacy and anonymity. Looking back, I suppose I have always been photographing reflections of myself trying to make sense of the contradictions, absurdity, dignity, aloneness, connectedness, and resilience of human beings. I don’t think of myself as a street photographer. I think of myself simply, as someone observing what it means to be human.

Artist Bio

Christopher Porter is a Canadian photographer whose work explores the relationship between people and the environments they inhabit. His photographs have been exhibited internationally in galleries and festivals, including CONTACT Photography Festival, Toronto and Art Basel, Miami. His images have been featured in Lens Culture, (t)here Contemporary Arts (New York), Criterion, Cahiers du Cinéma, and are held in private collections in Canada, the United States, France, England, and Germany.

All images and text © Christopher Porter