User:Herman Rahman/sandbox

= Reineke Otten =

Reineke Otten (The Netherlands, 1979) is a designer working in the field of visual sociology. She records and assembles images and information to reveal society’s patterns and orders — and occasionally, to generate beauty. Reineke graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven, and her notable body of works include World Skin Colour, Urban Daily Life and China Daily Life. She has compiled thousands of digital images that demonstrate—and, in many cases, combine—the potential of images and the associative power of repetition to showcase visual typologies of the everyday life.

= Urban Daily Life =

In Urban Daily Life, Reineke, using 'Streetology' where she practices a 'method of classifying and visually analyzing patterns of urban daily life', and she photographs similar details of cities all over the world. These details include Street Signs, Billboards, Fountains, Benches etc. It is an ongoing project, and the images are catalogued on http://www.urbandailylife.com.

China Daily Life
In China Daily Life, Reineke Otten organizes two years' worth of digital photographs that explore China's colossal cities along carefully structured themes, including street culture, traditional architecture, and migrant workers. Facing each large photograph is a sequence of smaller photos the size of a camera's LCD screen, which echo and amplify the scene. Some detail is lost in the process, but the technique effectively conveys a fleeting and fragmented perspective impression of urban China and Otten's stream-of-consciousness approach. "My book is just as temporary as an Ikea catalogue," Otten admits in the introduction by Charlie Koolhaas. The comparison is apt: The book is clean and angular, its white pages splashed with vibrant color from Hong Kong's neon signs or heaps of gutted fish at a street market.

= World Skin Colour =

In this project Reineke, using research and interviews, collects palettes and maps based on skin colors and becomes a visual analysis translated into maps of skin colors as they appear throughout the world. What started of as her graduation project in 2002, it has now been shown in various forms, such as in exhibitions, posters and scarves. The project can be accessed at http://worldskincolors.com.