Building Ambiguities
This project began with a photograph I shot in San Francisco of two buildings. I liked the way the light fell on the buildings. It was difficult to tell which building was in the foreground and which in background. The lighter building would flip from foreground to background as I ran my eyes over the image. As a fan of Escher and the optical illusionists, this image appealed to me and I lived with it on my studio wall for many months.
Later I found myself photographing in New York City. Walking along in lower Manhattan I saw, from some blocks away, what I was certain were three buildings. Closer examination revealed I was wrong. There were only two. I had used all the visual information available to me to differentiate between reflection and substance, yet had been completely fooled. My interest in these two images led to this body of work. When I began this project I decided to isolate pieces of buildings and try to create visual ambiguities in the areas between and around them. I set out to play with the effects of line, color, light, reflection and perspective on the visual clues that I use to understand the geometry of a photograph. I found that I could use sections of buildings, isolated and juxtaposed, with common reference points, to form edges that appear to flip from background to foreground or inside to outside as you run your eye up and down the image. I found I could introduce uncertainty as to the size of the pieces of buildings, disguise the number of buildings, create uncertainty in the areas that dominate linear perspective, and confuse depth relationships. The photographs in this project were taken in San Francisco, New York City, Houston, London, and Paris. |