Hallo und Willkommen, welcome to AidanEyewitness.
In this video I tell the story of my giant photo collage, the Manchester Mega-Photo
captured in February 2006 and displayed at Urbis Manchester from mid-2008.
It was the largest and most detailed photo collage of Manchester ever created, probably.
I'm including my interview on Channel M with Byron Evans and Nikki Dean,
set against detailed shots zooming into panning around the digital version of the
Manchester Mega-Photo, which is actually smaller than the original photo collage.
And by coincidence there was around the same time a giant painting
of Liverpool by Ben Johnson. That's on display at the Museum of Liverpool.
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So let's wind the clock back now to mid-1996, which is our starting point...
The late 1990s and 2000s was an exciting time in Manchester. I documented progress
on my Eyewitness in Manchester website. The city was being rebuilt after the IRA bomb,
which exploded on Saturday the 15th of June 1996. And by the way, it wasn't the, quote,
'biggest favour anyone ever did' to Manchester. It was a pointless act of terrorism that could
easily have killed hundreds of people. It injured around 200 and devastated a whole city quarter.
The regeneration of Manchester was already underway.
The destruction made things go faster and attracted extra funding.
Many new buildings appeared, including Urbis, designed by Ian Simpson Architects,
now SimpsonHaugh. Completed in 2002, it was a groundbreaking, though controversial building
due to its design and cost. It was conceived as a museum of the city and venue for events.
I photographed its construction and took photos for the City Voices exhibit on the top floor,
featuring video interviews with local people. In the end, I was interviewed for it as well.
A few years later a new structure started to appear on the site of
an old railway viaduct at the bottom of Deansgate.
It was the Beetham Tower, also designed by Ian Simpson. I took a keen interest
in it and documented its progress. On my Eyewitness in Manchester website,
I expressed a wish to go to the top and take photos. My wish was granted by one of my readers,
who was working on the project at the time and invited me to go on site and ascend to the top.
My first photos were a bit misty. It was early 2006 in the middle of winter.
Then an idea came into my head. Maybe I could take a gigantic composite photograph of the view,
consisting of multiple shots taken with a zoom lens. For many years, I had dreamed of taking a
mega photo collage like this. But I needed sunny weather. Soon it was clear and after quick phone
call, I was allowed to go to the top with my Fuji digital SLR camera and zoom lens. On the roof,
construction was still in progress. Just beyond the safety barrier was a 158 metre drop.
After some test shots, I took the camera off the tripod and used it hand-held.
Starting in the upper left, with the zoom lens on 300mm, I took roughly overlapping photos covering
the entire view in columns from top left to lower right. It took over an hour and my hands were
freezing. I packed the camera, went back down to the ground, thanked my contact and returned home.
Studying the photos, well over 1000, I was impressed with the detail but what was I
going to do with them? I tried merging a few of them in Photoshop but I soon ran out of memory.
I would need a much more powerful computer. I decided to put the project to one side.
In the meantime, I visited Urbis quite a few times and documented some of their exhibitions.
I got to know a few of the staff there. And then in early 2008, an idea came into my head.
Instead of trying to create a mega-sized digital file,
why not simply print out the images at poster size and stick them up on a wall
to make a gigantic photo collage? But where would I find a wall big enough to display it?
I contacted the people at Urbis and they thought it was a great idea. I made a proposal, including
a visualisation. It would be roughly 8 metres wide by 4 metres high. I named it the Manchester
Mega-Photo and it would probably be the largest megapixel image of Manchester ever created.
Urbis commissioned the work and paid for the prints,
which filled the boot of my car. The printing was done by my colleagues at
Big Exposure Print. I highly recommend them. Look them up online.
There was an existing exhibit named The City Wall.
To provide the display surface, it was covered in wood and painted white. Beginning from a cross I
made in the middle with a pencil, two assistants started to put up the photos using double-sided
tape, working outwards. After three days, all photos were mounted. It looked stunning. It went
on display on Friday the 4th of July 2008. The plan was to keep it on display for a few months.
It was a big hit with visitors and a great educational resource. People stood in front
of it for a long time studying all the details and pointing at features within the cityscape.
We tried to find sponsorship but apart from Cityco, there were no
offers. It was in the midst of the banking crisis. Still, I gained a lot of good publicity,
including a double-page spread in the Manchester Evening News.
At the time, the studio of Channel M was in the Urbis building
and they did the following interview with me.
That's all thanks to Manchester photographer Aidan O’Rourke, who joins us this morning.
A very good morning to you and you're the chap responsible for the rather stunning
photograph we've got in the foyer here at the Urbis, the Manchester Mega-Photo.
It’s massive! It’s wonderful! How did this come about then, Aidan?
Well, I was invited to go up the Beetham Tower while it was under construction
and I took the opportunity to do a project which I’d been planning for quite some years.
Because I’ve been interested in digital photography since 1994. I’d always had
this idea of taking a multiple digital photograph with a huge amount of detail
and I was looking for the right subject and the view of
the Manchester cityscape from the Beetham Tower was the ideal subject.
So I went ahead and took one. I say one, it was one photograph,
but it consisted of 860 photographs, so 860 photographs taken with the zoom lens.
So how do you do that? Are you very still and then shot, shot, shot, shot or...?
That’s it basically yes.
I tried using a tripod first but I couldn’t really set it up properly because I didn’t
have control over the camera so I just got rid of the tripod and then I just did it handheld.
So I started at the top left corner on the horizon, or the hills above Bury,
and then just went in columns down and then the next column, and then the next column, and so on
until I’d completed roughly a 180-degree panorama.
And for Urbis we used a section of that. Because if we had actually done the whole panorama
that I took, then it would be actually three times the width of what’s there.
So there is a possibility, maybe in the future,
of doing the full width. So what you're seeing there is a 90-degree panorama.
Now, the fascinating thing about that picture and I suppose about
Manchester as well because that piccie was taken in 2006 and I've been looking
at it now and it’s interesting to see the dramatic changes since already.
The ever-changing face of the cityscape of Manchester is frightening, isn’t it?
Yes, yes, well one of the most obvious things on the right-hand side is City
Tower and it has since been painted white, that's quite striking, and many of the
buildings that were under construction of the time, have now been completed.
Like West Properties' Skyline Central, that’s visible. Tempus tower on the left,
the Great Northern tower in the foreground, they’ve all been completed.
Then there are other things as well and one of the most striking things, if you look now at
the same scene in the top left corner, on the hills is the windfarm, Scout Moor wind farm.
Right! So have you plans to do another one then are you going to follow this,
perhaps over a couple of years, take the same again?
Yes, that would be a good idea. And I’d like to do different views as well. Yes.
I think it’s a fantastic way of archiving Manchester's changing city scene, but I mean
I love the view from the Beetham Tower. I think it’s fantastic. It’s just that unfortunately,
the majority of people won’t be able to get to see it because that bar area is not open until
the evening, so it’s not until nighttime that people can actually get up there and have a look.
This is the view from the roof of course, which you don’t normally have access to. It’s such
a shame that Manchester doesn’t have a proper observation tower like Toronto or New York or
whatever. I think that's something that we really need, a place where you can look at Manchester.
Definitely, because it’s so beautiful and even within a standard size photograph you can see
that it’s a stunning view but the detail in which your photograph allows us to see things
it’s really fascinating and we probably walk past it every day, and little do you know how beautiful
it is. You can just about read car number plates, there’s always something to look at.
Is this your stock-in-trade Aidan, landscapes? Well, I've
photographed Manchester and other cities since 1996
and I'm mainly interested in all aspects of the city, the architecture street scenes,
transport, everything you see when you're out and about, when you're walking through the city.
Do you have a favourite view or a favourite place are Manchester,
Greater Manchester in which to take photographs, perhaps a hidden gem that you can tell us about?
Well, my favourite place around the Greater Manchester area would be the city centre.
I think there is a large concentration of interesting things there, and it's
familiar to everybody, but I like taking landscapes as well…
But Urbis is there and then immediately opposite you’ve got Chetham's School of
Music, which is ancient and you know we’ve got the John Rylands
Library next to the brand-new Bank of Scotland, the juxtaposition is fantastic.
Yes, yes, I like a lot, I like the contrasts and the fact that it’s changing,
there’s always something new and of course, there are lots of buildings disappearing as well,
unfortunately. And I try and capture as many of them as I can but don’t always manage it.
Aidan, your mega photo is going to be here in the foyer of Urbis until hopefully January,
so people can come and see this any time they like. It’s absolutely free
to have a look at, a fascinating view of our city.
So we’ve got your website on screen for information people can go And see
the rest of your work there. Thank you very much for coming in and seeing us and thank you for the
picture because it does make a very pleasant walk into work in the morning. I’m glad to hear that!
The Manchester Mega-Photo remained on display until April 2009,
when it was taken down. The right-hand side was put up in the Urbis shop.
Not long after that, Channel M closed down.
And then it was announced Urbis would close and the building would be converted
to house the National Football Museum.
The remaining section of the Mega-photo was removed.
It was always intended to be a temporary exhibit.
I didn't make any more megapixel images. It was a case of
'been there done that'. I moved on to other projects leading to this YouTube channel.
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