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Phil Douglis | all galleries >> Galleries >> Gallery Six: Vantage Point makes the difference > A slice of Baixa, Lisbon, Portugal, 2004
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04-SEP-2004

A slice of Baixa, Lisbon, Portugal, 2004

I used a 245mm telephoto converter lens to reach out and compress a slice of Lisbon’s Baixa neighborhood from the top of the Elevador de Santa Justa, an iron elevator tower built around 100 years ago by one of A.G. Eiffel’s apprentices. The buildings running across the middle of the picture display laundry, umbrellas, satellite TV dishes, and windows of every description, and are typical of the 18th and 19th century architecture that gives the city its great charm. The more I study this image, the more I realize how critical my vantage point was. In order to reach across those rooftops, I had to be high – very high. I was not shooting down from the elevator tower, as much as I was shooting away from it. My height allowed me to juxtapose the mass of red rooftops in the foreground and that solid wall of wonderfully mismatched 19th century homes on the side of a hill beyond them. It was my camera position that made such juxtaposition possible.

Canon PowerShot G5
1/1250s f/4.0 at 28.8mm full exif

other sizes: small medium large original auto
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Phil Douglis21-Aug-2006 21:48
Thanks, Chris, for studying this image so carefully. The close crop strengthens the feeling of compression my lens has given me here. And my high vantage point creates the critical juxtaposition of the layers of buildings here. It allows me to bring near and far together into a single image.
Chris Sofopoulos21-Aug-2006 08:23
Again the angle and crop are superb! A very good vantage point in my opinion.
A vantage point that works perfectly!
Phil Douglis27-Mar-2005 19:47
You are very much in synch with my thinking on this one, Benchang. This image is similar to my Stupa Rainbow athttp://www.pbase.com/pnd1/image/40192307 because of the flattening effect caused by the telephoto lens. On this shot, I used a teleconverter lens on my Canon G5, which zoomed out to 245mm. I made the Stupa image with my Panasonic Lumix FZ20, which zooms out to a much longer focal length of 432mm -- which compresses the appearance of those stupas much more dramatically than I could compress the old buildings in this shot.

However, as you note, what compression I did get here has flattened these houses into a pattern that is, as you say, akin to a form of folk art. You are correct in likening this image to the Huxian County "farmers village" folk art painting. I visited these painters when I was in Xi'an last summer, and was probably influenced to a degree by their use of flattened perspective. You are right - such flattening can often change the ordinary into the extraordinary by rearranging the way we perceive spatial relationships. Here the old buildings are compressed and piled upon each other, eliminating the streets and squares and parks that actually separate them. Instead of an overview of a city, it becomes a tapestry of Lisbon's history,
Benchang Tang 27-Mar-2005 13:36
This picture falls in the same categary, more or less, as the stupa picture. With your tele-zoom lense and right vatage point you make your pictures abstractised and patterniced in the way that what in the picture look not that common and more beautiful. Here it is obvious the the view is not in the perspective common in our eye view and traditional western paintings. But more like in the folk paintings originated from Huxian County, near Xi'an, and also common in Chinese traditional landscapes paintings. Maybe I have coined some words here, sorry.
Phil Douglis06-Nov-2004 19:49
I don't see this image through the negative prism you do, Maureen. I see it as an evocation of time and life and history. These buildings do not represent an unkempt, dirty, worn city to me. I see them as a crazy quilt pattern of structures representing life in Lisbon over the last few hundred years. Lisbon, like many European cities, respects its past. It does not tear down its old buildings. It lives in them. There is no room for nature here in the city's center --to find nature, Lisboans flock to the beautiful parks that surround the core of the city. What you see here as a lifeless trap is really the opposite. You are looking here at the hive itself. All the bees are either away at work, or stacked inside, living their lives as they have lived them for centuries.
Guest 06-Nov-2004 12:52
What draws my eye to this every time are the two colors seen - red and and sort of a parchment color. So my eyes are immediately drawn to this photo in this gallery, but upon further observation, instead of feeling the warmth those two colors evoke, I'm disturbed. I see signs of life, but no life in this photo. I see unkempt and eroding dwellings all piled on top of one another. I see two more colors - beige and black. There are only a few vibrant colors in very small places here - a tiny splash of green and gold here and there, but that's it. Because of your vantage point, I see no signs of life in nature. No grass, no dirt, no sky. My eyes are forced to continue looking at these dirty, worn buildings. There's no escape.
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