The Olympic City
The Olympic City is a photography project by Jon Pack and Gary Hustwit that looks at the legacy of the Olympic Games in former host cities around the world. Hosting the Olympics has become a way for a city to show itself off on an international stage and generate toursim dollars, and cities spend millions or billions for the privilege. But after the events are over, the medals have been handed out, and the torch is extinguished, what's next? What happens to a city after the Olympics are gone?
In The Olympic City, Jon Pack and Gary Hustwit are documenting the successes and failures, the forgotten remnants and ghosts of the Olympic spectacle. Some former Olympic sites are retrofitted and used in ways that belie their grand beginnings; turned into prisons, housing, malls, gyms, churches. Others sit unused for decades and become tragic time capsules, examples of misguided planning and broken promises of the benefits that the Games would bring. They are interested in these disparate ideas — decay and rebirth — and how each site seems to have gone one way or the other, either by choice or circumstance. They are equally interested in the lives of the people whose neighborhoods have been transformed by Olympic development.
Jon Pack is a Brooklyn-based photographer whose work has been exhibited in galleries in the US and Europe, and has appeared on book covers from publishers including Simon & Schuster and Random House. His previous projects include the limited-edition book Out There; That Thing We Call Nature.
Gary Hustwit is an independent filmmaker based in New York and London. He worked with punk label SST Records in the late 1980s, and was subsequently involved in a wide range of projects in music and book publishing before he began producing documentaries in 2001. His films include the design documentaries Helvetica, Objectified, and Urbanized.
Contact:
General information: info@olympiccityproject.com
Media inquiries: jessica@filmfirstco.com
Website: olympiccityproject.com
To coincide with the London 2012 Games, see exhibition at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City, August 8 to 18.
In The Olympic City, Jon Pack and Gary Hustwit are documenting the successes and failures, the forgotten remnants and ghosts of the Olympic spectacle. Some former Olympic sites are retrofitted and used in ways that belie their grand beginnings; turned into prisons, housing, malls, gyms, churches. Others sit unused for decades and become tragic time capsules, examples of misguided planning and broken promises of the benefits that the Games would bring. They are interested in these disparate ideas — decay and rebirth — and how each site seems to have gone one way or the other, either by choice or circumstance. They are equally interested in the lives of the people whose neighborhoods have been transformed by Olympic development.
Jon Pack is a Brooklyn-based photographer whose work has been exhibited in galleries in the US and Europe, and has appeared on book covers from publishers including Simon & Schuster and Random House. His previous projects include the limited-edition book Out There; That Thing We Call Nature.
Gary Hustwit is an independent filmmaker based in New York and London. He worked with punk label SST Records in the late 1980s, and was subsequently involved in a wide range of projects in music and book publishing before he began producing documentaries in 2001. His films include the design documentaries Helvetica, Objectified, and Urbanized.
Contact:
General information: info@olympiccityproject.com
Media inquiries: jessica@filmfirstco.com
Website: olympiccityproject.com
To coincide with the London 2012 Games, see exhibition at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City, August 8 to 18.
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