Shine City Photoshoot: Artist Study
My photo set Industrial:
Without us noticing, our world has been overtaken by architecture. Harsh edges pervade our view, metal structures fill our periphery, and immovable pillars stand proud on our ground; together, they have painted the truest image of a concrete jungle, and are defining not only in their appearance but also in our lives. The cruel refraction of light upon glass panes is unforgiving—it obscures the countless stories of people living just beyond them.
In the first image, the dark blocks of construction block our view of what’s behind, as if proclaiming dominance. We never get to see what’s behind the panes of glass, because our perspective from the ground up spares little information, and the reflective materials do not permit our intrusion. In the last image, the rooms behind the windows lie solemn and forsaken, a mere thumbnail of the substance contained in the building. Only in the wisps of smoke coming out of industrial chimneys can we find a form of release, a source of open air that quenches our suffocation. We see it in the distance, existing but not quite important in this world.
In this set, I utilized a black-and-white color palette to “strip back” the images. Devoid of color, they reflect visually what they reflect practically in the real world: they are cold, hard, and unfeeling. The most noticeable splash of brighter color out of all three pictures is the streak of smoke in the middle, which pulls the viewer’s attention to this element. The architecture, on the other hand, is where most dark patches are collected. Apart from the use of color, I also tried to capture as many straight lines and geometric shapes as possible. For instance, I found corners of buildings where there were obvious, repeating patterns of rectangles and straight borders. Again, the most obvious curved line in this entire set can be found in the chimney’s silhouette. Lastly, all three images included the rule of thirds. This means that there is a comfortable balance in each of the photos, and that they can show architectural structures in a more palatable way. The rule of thirds is a technique quite commonly used in pictures of architecture.
From Gigi Chuang’s Achromatica collection:
https://gigichungphotography.com/achromatica
These images were chosen from the Achromatica collection, created by photographer Gigi Chuang.
There are certain unmistakable similarities between my set and these images. Namely, both the former and the latter are in black and white, with a lot of sharp contrast between the two. As the rule of thirds is commonly used for photographing, it is also present in a lot of Chuang’s images. Both her pictures and mine contain many patterns, especially the repetition of geometric elements (shapes, lines, curves, etc.).
On the other hand, there is an element that appears often in Chuang’s photos that is absent in mine: people. In fact, whereas my set does not include any signs of human life or activity, many Achromatica images have people or transport as their main characters. In this way, it is as if Chuang’s photos show a warmer, more welcoming, and more sentimental side of the cityscape, whereas my set focused on the distance between inhabitants and the architecture.
I love how her photos show the loneliness that I wished to convey, but in a way that does not require architecture to be completely separated from people. Instead, it is the depiction of people standing so close to towering mounds of concrete and compact blocks of geometric patterns—it is this portrayal that shows the isolation. It is the very act of placing animate human beings or transport next to inanimate leviathans—this type of juxtaposition—that highlights just how isolated we are in the modern world. Even on a busy street, each person is on his or her own. We travel through the light and shadows that concrete casts upon concrete, just like we endure the twists and turns of life solo.