The Photogenic City

The Photogenic City is an ongoing project about exploring the urban fabric and imaging the state of the city. It is a collection of expressions in geometric abstractions and colour fields of streets and alleys. The mundane, dispensable, or overlooked spots that I come across are more appealing because they are messy, unpretentious, practical, and patched up. There is more variety, opportunity, and implied story in these non-places. The façades are changed by the weather in time. I notice the chipping masonry, flaking paint, and moulding surfaces. And the intervention or neglect by people is also significant. I notice the dusty windows, the tagging and corrective paint patching, the equipment laid about, and the trash left behind. I find the rhythms, patterns, paint colours, accents, aperture shapes, protruding pipe lines, grills, and cracks on building walls appealing. And when I arrange them in a frame I see beauty, perceive meaning, and feel pleasure, like the experience I had looking at the paintings of artists I admire. Not desiring an aesthetic fantasy, it is when I step back to include a wall in its own context that it and I connect to the ever changing city.