Constructing Negative Space: Revised Artist Statement

As a person easily fascinated by small details, I find the intricacy of simple objects and buildings to be something deserving of attention. While my eventual goal is to create my own architectural forms, I found it necessary to first understand the guiding principles inherent to structural design. I set out to photograph architecture in order to better understand it; I wanted to truly learn the principles instead of just reading about them in a textbook.

Photography is a method of observation but also of interaction. I have a profound connection with each of the buildings I capture. I touch them, I walk around them, and if possible, I climb to their peaks. Taking a picture of them only aids in my understanding of their symmetry, functionality, and spatiality.

When photographing architecture, I often use oblique angles as a way of abstracting my subjects. This forces viewers to look at complex structures as a collection of simple elements. Just as modern architecture removes all excessive ornamentation, my photographs strip buildings down to their essential components. Structures are reduced to forms, textures, tones, highlights, shadows, and geometric relationships and overcast skies become basic shapes. To take away everything unnecessary is to glorify what remains. The minimalism and purity often found in the constructed world is overwhelmingly beautiful to me and I seek to understand and convey this through my photography.

Constructing Negative Space: Free-Write 3

A quote I particularly like:

"Hervé approached his subjects, specifically the buildings he was commissioned to document, with a particular focus on conveying a sense of space, texture and structure. Through a strong contrast of light and shadow, Hervé defined the dialogue between substance and form as well as placing emphasis on building details."

(From http://historyofourworld.wordpress.com/2010/10/22/building-images-lucien-herve/)


I haven't really discussed why my work aligns with the aims of new vision photography, but I would like to do so now. Straight photography, or documentary style photography, was popular up until the mid-1930s. At this point, men like Maholy Nagy and other teachers/followers of the Bauhaus school started to explore the potentials of the medium. No longer was photography just a means of documenting reality, but a way of creating it, or forcing people to take notice of particular relationships that may have otherwise gone overlooked.

My work stands apart from documentary style photography, and is pretty in line with the aims of new vision photography. I often use oblique angles (either extreme ups or intense downs) as a way of disorienting my viewers. Just as modern architecture removes all excess from its structures, my photographs strip down buildings to their barest elements; all that is left are textures, tones, and geometric relationships.

The importance of doing such a thing is to foster a love of the simple. To take away everything unnecessary is to glorify everything that remains and is absolutely essential to the essence of a thing. When I photograph the most necessary details of a structure, I am showing what is most crucial to its existence. I think the most beautiful things are the most basic; I like to photograph what is pure, essential, and simple.

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.

Constructing Negative Space: Free-Write 1

Whenever I'm directly asked a question, I feel caught off guard. I begin to run through the long list of things that I'd been thinking of, from carpet patterns to a classmate's expression to whatever existential crisis had been plaguing me that week. After a good 30 seconds of consideration, I still find myself unsure of which thought could be translated into the appropriate verbal response for the question at hand. At times, I even forget the question I'd been asked in the first place.

Living in my own head doesn't help me create a cohesive artist talk, it seems. So, I've decided to use this blog as a place to brainstorm for my upcoming show. A stream of consciousness free write, but directed towards my architectural photographs.

Currently, here are the photographs I'm going to include in my thesis show:

(For the record, I hope to re-shoot the second to bottom some time this week, so long as the weather cooperates and delivers me an overcast day without precipitation.)

The first thing that jumps out at me when I look at this series is the white space. I remember one art class when my professor showed me a teddy bear and told me not to draw the bear, but to draw the space around it. It's easy to draw what we know, what we expect; if asked to draw a teddy bear, most people would revert to symbol drawing. But, when I was told to focus on a component that I had once not even considered, I began to see the bear differently.

The same is true with these images. When first presented with them, I see white space contrasted with blacks and greys. These white spaces attract me and force me to recognize patterns composed of clouded skies, or more eloquently put, of the absence of constructed space.

The negative space is especially evident because I use distorted angles, the likes of which were trademarks of New Vision photography (Maholy Nagy, Lucien Herve). In abstracting the buildings I choose to photograph, I force the viewer to look at my images as a collection of lines, shapes, forms, textures, tones, highlights, shadows, and geometric relationships. I photograph the way I see the world; often at weird angles, completely apart from preconceived notions, and always new and exciting. At this point, I'm still unsure if the focus is giving architecture a new lens or whether I'm really all gung ho about negative space. What would it mean to photograph the absence of something? (I should look this up tomorrow, maybe not at 3am).

Also, at this point I want to talk about the potentials of a video installation in my show. I have yet to test out my works with projectors (though I have looked into it online and also done tests with photoshop ), but I'm pretty sure my idea of overlapping two images at a time will work. When viewing the projected piece, neither of the two photographs being displayed will be fully apparent; the overlapping images will abstract the image even further, and thereby make the specific details of the buildings even more pronounced. I guess the images on the walls will be like the first step in this show and the video the second; the projection will display the highest point at which architecture can be abstracted while still making the details of the buildings apparent.