Camera:Canon EOS-10D Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada Aperture: f 8.0 ISO: 400 Shutter: 1/400 Galleries:Architecture, Black and White Date Uploaded: Jan 23, 2005
This deserves another trip to the "Recently Commented On" photo gallery here at DPC. It's just a superb and dramatic photo as an abstract image, and yet it is still a very straight forward everyday scene.
Three years later, and I still remember it! And I haven't lost my admiration for it either. In the intervening period I have slowly realised that I have a great attraction to images that are both abstract and not abstract at the same time. Images that have two lives simultaneously, I suppose; a literal identity (1185 W. Georgia) and another life as a celebration of what beauty can derive from just shapes, tones and mass, and the relationships between them. I have in the last year or so begun to experiment with this abstract/not abstract idea myself, and this image has remained clear in my mind as the inspiration for it.
From the gut: Wow - this is fascinating! What is it? The two light spots look like eyes - imagination going wild. It's a big geometrical beast. It evokes curiosity and interest and a little bit of fear of the unknown.
Edit to say that the title of the photo obviously illuminates what the subject is. But the emotional reaction definitely overrides that.
I am completely lost when looking at this photo. I know that it is probably a building, from the title and the challenge it was entered in, but I can't for the life of me figure out what I'm looking at. The two brighter things in the big dark thing suggest glowing eyes of a moster preparing to pounce, so the image has a sinister feel to me. I like it. It is an image that I keep coming back to and looking at, trying to make sense of it all.
As a viewer, I like to be disoriented. It involves me in the photograph. And this does that well. I have trouble understanding where I am, where I'm standing, what I'm angle I'm looking at this from. What are those eyes? Are they a reflection? Is this whole thing a reflection? It's different, though, than utter chaos because there are major shapes of light and dark, so a sense of divine order (qv Genesis) still remains... and there is also this large box shape that can be construed. But its lower edge is irregular, giving a sense of incompleteness, a poignant, vertiginous sense of things not coming together.
Oh! No comments before mine, but I like this photograph very much, so I will have to risk making a solitary fool of myself.
It's an image with some delicious contradictions. At first it appears made up of regular geometric shapes, but it's actually not. With the exception of the big triangle at upper left, every shape is just a little imperfect, irregular or asymmetrical. No line takes the easy, "natural" way to a corner of the frame. The effect is one of tension and restlessness.
The point-of-view also seems initially comprehensible, but a further moment's study shatters that illusion, too. Is it a building seen from above; seen from an adjacent, taller building? Or seen from below, from beneath some sort of overhanging structure? And what is that reflected detail? Is the whole image perhaps a reflection? I've even turned it upside down, without comfort. My every effort to rationalise it has been defeated.
Knowing something your views in these matters (from the forums), I expect that this irreconcilability is no accident. I'm not dismayed, anyway; my inability to master it is one of the things I most like about it.
The other is purely graphic. In particular the lovely gradient across the windows on the left side, and then the gentlest rendering of the window detail on the right hand side.
So that's it; bold shapes, delicate detail and bags of enigma. Can't wish for much more than that.
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