NOTES ON FOUND GEOMETRY

The images shown in this mini portfolio were selected from the section Building–Sky Interactions of the portfolio FOUND GEOMETRY: Architectural Interactions in Unplanned Manhattan, 2003-2009. The portfolio contains 23 images.

Three of the images are as photographed and three show their transformation in Photoshop.

The transformed images express what I saw in a way that the camera alone could not; and, conversely, these images could not exist without the photographs. Therefore this abstraction is derived from a photographic reality rather than from the imagining of non-representational forms.

The following is an abbreviated version of the text for FOUND GEOMETRY: Architectural Interactions in Unplanned Manhattan, 2003-2009

FOUND GEOMETRY…

“….In the utter congestion and cacophony of the City, any open space becomes visual nectar. The very act of looking upward is emancipating. Viewing from street level forces the eye upward. No longer free to dally at ground level, the eye is drawn to a building’s torso and up to the sky, which itself is drawn down to meet the building. The buildings take their energy skyward and the sky descends to embrace the buildings through reflection. Sky asserts itself into the presence of the buildings as the patterns of the open sky change with every view.

I am intrigued by the tops and upper portions of tall buildings as they appear against the blank space of the sky. Their shapes are sharp-edged, dissimilar, and without corresponding forms in nature. Groups of buildings create a high horizon punctuated not by the filigree of treetops or the opacity of geological features but by forms whose assemblage suggests some sort of man-made rules commandeering portions of the sky.

The diversity of shape and size that I find so fascinating could only result from unplanned development that occurred at various times, since the architect of a given building could not know the design or proximity of other buildings that would be built later. The dynamics of unplanned development and chance juxtapositions created an irregular urban horizon that I see as a physical embodiment of the diversity at the spiritual heart of the City.

In the variety of architectural visions, I see a tension between connectedness and random association leading to interactions between natural and man-made environments not previously seen. I want my photographs to evoke this sensibility.

The upper structures and terminations of these significant buildings in this magnificent City are now merely design elements whose relationships are determined both by their physical location and their location in the frame in the camera’s viewfinder. I see these relationships in purely graphic terms. A found geometry emerges in the interaction of planes, in the juxtaposition of independent regular patterns, in unexpected angularity and in the significance of negative space.

A theme throughout this portfolio is the interplay between plane and volume. Conceptually and visually, the ideas of boundary and negative space form a liaison between three-dimensional structures and the two-dimensional film plane. In this context, helping to see and interpret the world in two dimensions, found geometry became a unifier of the mosaic of urban and natural environments.”