One of the photographers I found when I was doing Assignment 1, the Square Mile, was David Roberts who photographs buildings in Manchester among other places. One of his images, “Juxtaposition” shows a Victorian and a modern building, their facades nearly filling the frame. It is a dramatic shot with a deep blue sky and light reflected off the buildings.
I am often struck by juxtapositions of old and new buildings and the contrast they create. So for this exercise I chose as my subject architectural contrasts and took photographs in both Sheffield and London, initially looking simply for examples of the old and new side by side. As I progressed with the project I became quite fascinated by the different tones, textures, lines and curves I saw, and decided to crop the images so they contained only features of the buildings, i.e.no sky or foreground. So the final series is not purely old and new architecture but has become a broader study in contrasts . I decided to make the images square and to use nine images to create a three by three grid.
Some of the images have come almost to resemble flat surfaces, and are reminiscent of tiles with abstract designs.
I posted these images on Facebook and got some comments:
“like the ones with the contrasting styles of building … some of them look almost flat which is cool”
“The viewer is definitely drawn to the contrast between old and new”
“I really like them. You should have an exhibition!”
Research point: Gerhard Richter’s ‘Atlas’ is a “collection of photographs, newspaper cuttings and sketches that the artist has been assembling since the mid 1960s (gerhard-richter.com/en/art/atlas). It is an extraordinary 801 pages long and is a catalogue of pages each containing connected images. Trying to find some pointers towards display, I am left with the question, are the individual images placed for size so that they fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, or is there some rationale dictated by what each portrays?
Foundations in Photography 