Shanghai is sometimes called the Gotham City of the east but it’s never looked more so than in this new photography series.
Amey Kandalgaonkar, who is also a trained architect, shows viewers a moody, noire side of the Chinese metropolis with his collection of photos titled “Dark Deco.”
He became mesmerized by the city after he moved there from Mumbai, immediately picking up on the similarities between Shanghai and Manhattan.
“Shanghai is famous for art deco architecture so being an architecture I find it fascinating,” he said. “New York has a high density of art deco architecture too and the cities developed around the same time. There’s a lot of similarity.”
The look he gives the city in his photos evokes “Batman: The Animated Series” — the TV show created by Warner Brothers which he loved watching.
In total, it took Kandalgaonkar about four months to shoot the project, starting last September.
“It took me a few months to walk around the city and find the right angles,” he said. “I was just experimenting with using filters that allow you to take a photograph for four to five minutes. It really captures the motion of objects and it captures the moving clouds. Most of the time in Shanghai the weather is very cloudy.”
Although Shanghai is a bustling city of 14 million people, very few people appear at all in his work creating a somewhat eery effect.
“The filters don’t capture any moving objects but only captures things that are stationary,” he explains.
To see more of Kandalgaonkar’s work, click here.