08-AUG-2006
Fire escape, Chambers Street, New York City, 2006
Chambers Street is lined with 19th Century buildings as it crosses the city’s old downtown. Fire has always been a threat to such buildings and it remains so today.
I wanted to make a building picture that speaks to this danger. As I walked along Chambers Street I found a fire escape directly overhead. Just across the street was an old building in the process of renovation. Using a 28mm wideangle lens, I was able to get both into my frame, and waited for those two clouds, which imply smoke, to flow out of the old building. Part of the lower cloud is quite dark, throwing a shadow that implies threat. Even the modern structure at lower right helps, offering an incongruous counterpoint and placing the image in the present time.
02-AUG-2006
Embellishment, New York City, 2006
Many of my building pictures are abstractions of the structure itself. I will only show part of a building – that part that best makes the point I wish to express. In this case, I juxtapose contrasting detail in the sculpted frieze and the neighboring columns to tell the story of the classical architecture that held sway during New York’s “Golden Age” at the beginning of the last century. From ground level, this golden age is invisible. The plate glass windows of shops lure pedestrians who never even think of looking up. But look up I did, and this is the result – a trip back another time, a time when commercial architecture spoke of ancient Greece and imperial Rome instead of mass merchandizing.
23-MAR-2006
A-bomb dome, Hiroshima, Japan, 2006
Hiroshima's former Industrial Promotion Hall was gutted by the firestorm triggered by the world's first atomic bombing. Its ruins are preserved as a memorial. I abstract the building itself by shooting into the sun, which drastically under exposes the image and makes the sky itself a dark gray. The flare of the sun symbolizes the blast of the atomic bomb itself over this very spot.
01-APR-2006
Old house, Old Town, Lijiang, China, 2006
A closer look reveals a batch of clothing on the line, waiting, no doubt, for the rays of the morning sun. I used a low vantage point to make this image, creating both abstraction and tension by moving my position so that the narrow band of sky between the overhanging structures is charged with tension. The play of soft morning light on the ornate shutters behind the clothes adds important contextual detail.
14-MAR-2006
Forbidden City renovation, Beijing, China, 2006
The most important parts of Beijing's famed Forbidden City are being completely renovated for the 2008 Olympic festivities. The largest of its buildings, the Hall of Supreme Harmony, is entirely covered in scaffolding, giving me a chance to make an image never before possible -- people at work in the sky over the imperial palace. I find this ballet in the sky to be more incongruous and abstract, as well as richer in human values, than any post card view of the building itself. Most visitors were disappointed that they could not see this world famous building. I was delighted by the renovation – it gave me, as the saying goes, a chance to make lemonade out of a lemon.
15-MAR-2006
Rising with the sun, Beijing, China, 2006
Ancient Beijing, host to the 2008 Olympic games, is in the throes of a massive building boom. Looking east from our hotel window we saw massive cranes topping dozens of new buildings that seem to be rising along with the sun. The joint symbolism of a rising sun and at least ten huge cranes makes this image go well beyond a standard shot of the Beijing skyline. The low light abstracts the entire scene, the color adds its own symbolic meaning, and the layer after layer of dimly perceived buildings attests to the size of this massive city.
07-FEB-2006
School, Ghost Town, Grafton, Utah, 2006
Grafton, Utah, lies along the Virgin River just outside of Zion National Park. In 1886, its Mormon settlers built this adobe building to use as a school and church. In the early years of the 20th Century, its families moved to land with better irrigation, leaving this old school and a graveyard behind. This image offers more than a description of the building itself. It goes further, providing a ghostly context for the building. It stands alone in a desert, under wisps of clouds. I used a 24mm wideangle lens to stretch the scene, and stress the height of the clouds as well as the sweep of the landscape, while keeping the size of the building as large as possible within the frame. (If I had used a narrower focal length, I could have included the same content by backing up, but then the building would have become smaller and lost its emphasis.) The key to the expressiveness of this image is the placement of the diagonal cloud over the chimney of the building. It appears as smoke, yet the building has been vacant for more than 100 years.
10-FEB-2006
Hoover Dam, Lake Mead, Nevada, 2006
During the Great Depression, five thousand men and their families came to Black Canyon to tame the Colorado River. They worked for five years and created the highest dam on earth. It was the costliest water project ever, and the home of the largest power plant of its time. In this image, I try to express the beauty, sweep, and magnitude of this dam by abstracting it, suggesting more than I show. By using my spot meter to expose for the illuminated surface of the dam, the background goes dark, throwing the surface of the dam into overwhelming prominence. I structure the image around rhythmic repetition, letting the eye flow up and down along the five vertical towers, while at the same time relying on five repeating curving lines and 30 curving horizontal lines on the face of the dam itself to create a pattern filled with dynamic energy. And energy is what this structure was built for more than seventy years ago.
30-OCT-2005
Under the Walls of Santa Ana, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, 2005
The sun was creating deep shadows on the strikingly yellow façade of Santa Ana church, and I waited for a person to enter my frame to provide contrast in scale. Finally, the perfect subject arrived -- a woman bearing a staff, a figure out of the San Miguel's past. She seems so small in comparison to the walls of the huge church, symbolizing the power it has over the lives of those who choose to worship there. I use the woman as context to express how big the building is in terms of its scale. I also crop the building so that the huge slabs in its side seem to soar forever, suggesting that the power of a church can be infinite. By not showing the whole structure, and leaving much to the imagination of the viewer, we say more about it.
16-JUL-2005
Call of the crow, St. Francis Cathedral, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2005
Santa Fe is the oldest capital city and the second oldest town in the United States. Founded in 1607 as “the royal city of the holy faith of St. Francis of Assisi,” its highest point is appropriately the uncompleted bell towers of St. Francis Cathedral. The towers are nesting places for crows. As I walked beneath this church early one morning, I heard this crow calling to me. Using my long lens, I characterize this building by reducing it to a series of geometric moldings and cornices topped by a solitary black crow. The elegance and precision of these architectural touches reflect the elaborate effort, knowledge and expense involved in constructing a house of worship, even an unfinished one. The crow, considered the most intelligent of all birds, has been revered and worshipped over the centuries. Combining these elements within a single image is an ideal way to celebrate the nature of this building. (Pun intended.) I don’t describe it here. Rather, I try to express what it means to me.
19-JUN-2005
Winches, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2005
The stairs within these old Dutch houses are too narrow to accept furniture. Their builders solved the problem by fitting permanent winches into the pediments of such buildings. These hoists are part of what makes Amsterdam look like Amsterdam. Many of them are still in regular use. Some buildings are constructed to lean slightly forward to expedite the winching process. I stress the winches in this wideangle image by underexposing the buildings, abstracting them in backlight against the sky to create a rhythmic flow of projecting hoists.
09-JUN-2005
Tavern, Waterloo, Belgium, 2005
This building might well have witnessed the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Today it serves as a tavern and battlefield wax museum. I noticed the similarity between the arched wings of the huge bronze imperial Napoleonic eagle that stands before the building, and the pair of projecting tiled roofs overhead. Both roofs and wings point upwards at their apex and droop down at the base, and both seem to have scalloped edges. I moved my camera to place the eagle’s wings into rhythmic harmony with those roofs, making both building and bird seem as if they are about to simultaneously take flight. The drooping wings of the eagle point to the colorful red curtains in each window, which seem to energize the imperial bird. Waterloo and Napoleon are names forever linked in history. This building and the symbol standing before it make this association memorably tangible.