Photographers with mild insomnia and an eye for the unusual will have the unique opportunity to play their part in an innovative global project to record and document their community before dawn, writes Karen Strunks.
The global phenomenon that is the 4am Project returns for its seventh event on 15th April, as bleary eyed photographers take to their local landscape to capture the moment during the dead of night.
Now in its third year, word has spread like wildfire about the arts project with people picking up their cameras in over 50 countries across the globe including UK, Brazil, Italy, China, Swaziland, Libya, Germany, Laos and the USA.
The 4am project is the brainchild of Birmingham based photographer, Karen Strunks and utilises social media and the online photo sharing site Flickr to create a community of images representing 4:00am across the globe.
The 4am Project, a worldwide community experience and aims to capture a time of day that many people rarely see. Utilising Flickr, the web space for sharing images, photographers around the world will be leaving the cosy confines of their beds to create a shared online gallery that illustrates the strange and wonderful life that goes on while we sleep.
Project organiser Karen Strunks said:
“Some of the world’s most beautiful photos are taken under the cover of night, but as we’re all tucked up in bed at that time, the moment just passes us by.
“The 4am Project aims to bring both photographers and non-photographers together, to create a global community which demonstrates how amazing our surrounding landscapes can be.
“Streets which are usually teeming with traffic are deserted, shopping centres are empty and hillsides peaceful, the perfect time to grab your camera and take some shots.”
The 4am Project captures peoples imagination all over the world. From a standing start, the project now has contributors from around 50 countries, such as Russia, Canada, USA, Australia, Malaysia, Sweden, and Brazil, and has 6000 superb quality images taken at 4am.
For more information, please visit www.4amproject.org.
Here at South Leeds Life we’re supporting Karen’s 4am Project and hope you’ll get up early (or stay up late!) and share your photos on our group Flickr pool. If you’d like to take part in the project:
* Grab your camera or camera-phone wherever you are in the city at 4am and take a snap.
* Once you’ve uploaded your pictures you can add them to our Flickr group, tagged ‘southleeds4am’ and ‘4amproject’. Add a description too. We’ll create a slideshow of the photos which will give a fantastic picture of our community at 4am. More nearer the date.
