Portrait
French, from Old French, image, from past participle of portraire, to portray

In considering Picasso’s statement that “art is a lie that makes us realize the truth”,
visualizing an instance selectively through a photographic frame constitutes in itself
an untruth, a willful omission of everything excluded from that framed view; yet it
reveals qualities and conditions that would have otherwise laid buried under the multiple visual
layers as they are seen by the un-filtered human eye.

A building portrait is the portrayal of the likeness of a building as seen in one decisive
moment. The willful view through the photographic frame attributes individual expressiveness
to the un-privileged act of construction while the anonymous acquires ubiquity even if only
as a fleeting untruth. The building portrait does not intend to document reality but rather
to amplify the imagined; through this selective augmentation the anonymous can become figural
and the average rediscovered as beautiful.