Constructing Negative Space: Free-Write 2

Above is the image resulting from my re-shoot from last week. A lot of the images I initially wanted to include had cloudy or blue skies. The latter was easy to fix in photoshop; (I just changed the photo filter used when I converted the image to black and white), but the former was all but impossible and would have yielded an overly edited photograph. To fix this issue, I re-shot 3 of the 8 photographs I chose to include in my show over the course of this semester. Without the whited-out sky, I felt as though a lot of my images were architectural landscapes and not pure geometry (more documentary-styled than new vision photographs). I wanted the shapes in my images as abstract and possible and the clouds detracted from the shape that a white sky creates.

The angles I chose to shoot tend to be taken while looking upwards towards the sky. Although this was unintentional and I had in fact just been looking for interesting geometric relationships, the sky becomes part of what my work is about. The negative space of the sky becomes its own shape, no more or less important than the shapes found within the structures in my photographs. By shooting at inverted angles (ones not common to architectural or home magazines), I'm forcing viewers to look at buildings as a collection of simple elements. The sky is just another unornamented form. Simple shapes eventually give way to complex structures.