You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'Visual comparisons' category.
Corners expressed I
Outer walls and moat of Nijō Castle. The raised corner used to house a five storey tower which served as a look-out in 1750 but was not rebuilt. (Built from 1601 to 1626 by Tokugawa Ieyasu, founder of the Edo Shogunate). Kyoto, Japan, 2004
Corners expressed II
Corner of the three-tier marble terrace leading to the Hall of Preserving Harmony in the Forbidden City. (Built from 1406 to 1420). Beijing, China, 2007
Buy prints and usage rights of these diptych images here which are featured in my architectural photography book, Drawing Parallels, Architecture Observed
Text & Photography © Quintin Lake, 2010
An article on Drawing Parallels: Architecture Observed in EOS Magazine January-March 2010 focusing on technique and equipment selection from the Canon EOS system best suited for Architectural Photography.
Drawing Parallels
Architect and photographer Quintin Lake uses visual comparisons drawn from his extensive travels to produce a book of pairings of photographs that force us to re-examine the world around us and challenge our understanding of what constitutes architecture. Quintin currently uses an EOS 5D but he took other digital images in the book using an EOS 10D and 1Ds, and earlier analogue images using an EOS 1000,600 and EOS 1.
‘My photographs are from my travels to over 60 countries,” explains Quintin. “so technical difficulties were mos!ly climatic: humidity, heat and cold, and for the remoter locations, being a long time away from electricity. To deal with long periods away from mains power, such as Lesotho or Peru I carried half a dozen spare batteries which I found easier than using solar, which requires being in one location for an extended period.
“The wider angle and tilt-and-shift lenses offered by Canon are superior to anything offered by the competition, and these lenses are particularly important for photographing architecture. I also like the colour rendering and feel of the digital file. which just look ‘right’. The camera’s ergonomic design makes sense and using the EOS system has become second nature to me.
“I have two styles of photographing architecture: an urban safari and a more static Study. When I arrive at a new city or place I’ll walk around for hours on an urban safari to get a feel for a place and see the things of interest, which may not be in a guide-book. Therefore lightweight high quality lenses are the most important to me. The EF 24·105mm f4L is my most used lens for this kind of long urban walk. I often also carry an EF 100-400m m f4.5-5.6L as I like to pick out a graphic composition from the facade of a building, often from quite a distance. I also normally carry an EF 50mm /1.4 for very low light conditions. For a more static study of a building when I’ll spend a day or more there and won’t be walking around all day with the equipment, I’ll use a TS-E 24mm f3.5L and an EF 15·35mm f2,8L with a tripod.
Drawing Parallels, Architecture observed, Papadakis Publisher, £25 To order a copy visit papadakis.net
Waves & Ripples I
Lawn, railings and cobbles on Radcliffe Square viewed from St Mary’s, the University Church. Underneath the square is storage space for the Bodleian Library, which contains around 600,000 volumes. Oxford, England, 2009
Waves & Ripples II
Detail of the concrete ribs which make up the façade of the Copan building, built by architect Oscar Niemeyer. São Paulo, Brazil, 2008
Buy prints and usage rights of these diptych images here which are featured in my architectural photography book, Drawing Parallels, Architecture Observed
Text & Photography © Quintin Lake, 2010
Shine through, shine out I
Detail of Lincoln Cathedral East window showing The Creation and Redemption of Man. Stained glass by Ward and Nixon, 1855. Lincoln, UK, 2004
Shine through, shine out II
Neon advertising lights above Nanjing East Road. Shanghai, China, 2007
Buy prints and usage rights of these diptych images here which are featured in my architectural photography book, Drawing Parallels, Architecture Observed
Text & Photography © Quintin Lake, 2010
General Information
Press Release containing brief description, author biography and technical information from Papadakis Publisher (PDF) here
Book Cover Image (high res jpg)
An Architecture of Looking, Some directions for use. Foreword By Richard Wentworth
UK Stockists here
Media and Credit Information
Should you wish to feature any material from Drawing Parallels, I request that the following information be included within your piece:
- Book Cover image (high res jpg)
- Drawing Parallels: Architecture Observed by Quintin Lake
- £25 www.papadakis.net
Should you wish to include any additional material, I would be happy to provide it on request. Questions may me emailed to me at mail@quintinlake.com
For review copy request please contact my publisher, Papadakis Publisher
Chapter Extracts
Summary text and two print resolution (300dpi) sample spreads from each chapter available to download as a PDF .
All text and images © Quintin Lake. 2009
“When you look at a city, it’s like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it.”
Hugh Newell Jacobsen
The greatest architectural gestures of our civilisation, the very epitome and physical embodiment of that civilisation, the apparently random and chaotic surge of something intended and planned, the phenomenal paradox of achievement and disaster, the home of ultimate construction and destruction, the Twenty-First century city, is outpacing any attempt to define its nature the very second an image is formed of it. How to represent, how to see, how to know, this most mercurial of forms, that constantly defies notions of what is attainable? As a photographer, the emerging conurbations, the fresh unimagined megalopolises demand a perspective. This is a quest for scope. These horizons, where the patterns and grids of vast populations are assembled out of seeming chaos, are a bright optimistic contribution, a means of attempting to see a future that is happening right now.
Constant sky
left: Downtown São Paulo seen from the top of the Edificio Italiano.With a population of eleven million residents São Paulo is the most populous city in the Southern hemisphere. São Paulo, Brazil, 2008
right: Cuzco seen from Christo Blanco. The city has a population of 350,000 and is located at an altitude of 3,300m. Peru, 2008
Click on image to enlarge or download Print Res (300dpi) PDF of this spread here
Slicing cities
left: Highway in downtown São Paulo. Brazil, 2008
right: A man ascending an arch of Lupu Bridge over the Huangpu River. Shanghai, China, 2007
Click on image to enlarge or download Print Res (300dpi) PDF of this spread here
Extract from my architectural photography book: Drawing Parallels, Architecture Observed
Text & Photography © Quintin Lake, 2010
“Architecture [is] a theatre stage setting where the leading actors are the people, and to dramatically direct the dialogue between these people and space is the technique of designing.”
Kisho Kurokawa
Public places and buildings have the added dimension of acting as arenas for our lives. In the virtual era we have a heightened awareness of the nature of illusion, of the fact that we are at one and the same time both observing and participating.We see buildings as the backdrop to history and human drama, no longer as organic wholes to which we are connected. In a global village we become tourists and visitors to the sets of a world of other cultures. The photographer, always the contriver and exposer of visual illusion, is attuned to this particularly contemporary phenomenon. Cities and places continually present new ironies, making the observer constantly aware of the layers of transparency. People become orchestrated crowds, and architecture a grand theatrical set, yet individuals are still glimpsed, asserting the defiantly human amongst the towering forests of forms.
Up to the neck
left: Fibreglass shark sculpture erected in 1986, on the 41st anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb. Created by sculptor John Buckley for Bill Heine, who lives in the house. Neighbours tried to force Heine to remove the shark, but after an appeal to the UK’s Secretary of State for the Environment, it was allowed to remain. Oxford, England, 2009
right: Sculpted heads surrounding a front door in Lambeth. London, England, 2009
Click on image to enlarge or download Print Res (300dpi) PDF of this spread here
Spectating space
left: Seated viewers in front of Formal Session of the StateCouncil onMay 7, 1901, in honour of the 100th Anniversary of Its Founding by Ilya Yefimovich Repin, 1903, oil on canvas, State Russian Museum. St. Petersburg, Russia, 2007
right: A tour group outside Injeongjeon Hall (the throne hall), Changdeokgung palace. Originally built 1405, destroyed in the ImjinWars, restored 1609, destroyed by fire 1803. The current structure dates from 1804. Seoul, Korea, 2007
Click on image to enlarge or download Print Res (300dpi) PDF of this spread here
Extract from my architectural photography book: Drawing Parallels, Architecture Observed
Text & Photography © Quintin Lake, 2009
“Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.”
Walter Benjamin
A place is not a conglomeration of functional structures. Where we live, visit or observe, and the images we form and receive of it, gains its real nature from the feelings identified with it. An empty brutalist cityscape and an abandoned school gym, can speak of a more tragic dimension to our lives that is somehow inscribed in the very essence of a place. The way that vanished cultures persist in traces of their legacy, that nature reclaims vast human endeavours, that modern cruelty and power leave an aura or a sense of their very character in an ambience, is something that the photographer can capture. There are deeper, almost intangible remnants, some hauntingly sad, some joyful, that emerge as visual shocks or surprises, to be seen in the frozen image of a photograph. The chilling catastrophe of an abandoned city bereft of humanity clashes, paradoxically, with the defiant optimism of resurgent nature.
Reclamation
left: A doorway in Ta Prohm to a temple built in the late 12th and early 13th centuries as a monastery and university. The door is surrounded by silk cotton tree roots encased by strangler figs roots, which develop their own underground root
system. They then grow quickly, often strangling the host tree, which in time dies and rots away. The strangler fig continues to exist as a hollow tubular lattice that provides shelter for many forest animals. Siem Reap, Cambodia, 2003
right: A silver birch tree growing through the floor on the terrace of the Hotel Polissia 21 years after the Chernobyl disaster. Pripiat, Ukraine, 2007
Click on image to enlarge or download Print Res (300dpi) PDF of this spread here
Palimpsest
left: Lightswitch in a bedroom of the Hotel Polissia 21 years after the Chernobyl disaster. Pripiat, Ukraine, 2007
right: Billboard with posters removed at Green Park Underground Station. London, UK, 2009
Click on image to enlarge or download Print Res (300dpi) PDF of this spread here
Extract from my architectural photography book, Drawing Parallels, Architecture Observed
Text & Photography © Quintin Lake, 2009
“All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.”
Philip Johnson
Photography captures both the visual appearance and the hidden intent inherent in a building. However transitory or ephemeral the structure, we can see the impetus for human survival in the act of creating a shelter, whatever the material, whether it is as ancient and fundamental as stone and wood, or as modern and widespread as glass, concrete and plastic. The fact that a dwelling embodies a more complex range of impulses, a strange mixture of domesticity and adornment, a basic expression of identity, in what can only be hinted at in the concept of home, forms the secret emotional dimension to architecture that emerges in the photograph. This is another landscape, beyond function and form, an emotional and psychological aspect that is only just beginning to be charted in these far-reaching visual connections.
A door & two windows
left: The home of D. Maninha, aged 94, one of the oldest inhabitants. Pylons, Cubatão, Brazil, 2008
right: Thabang and family outside their home in Ha Motenalapi in the Senqunyane valley. They are wearing their Basotho tribal blankets. The door and window mouldings demonstrate Litema, the mural art of the Basotho. The hut floor and window mouldings are made from Daga, a mix of earth and dung. The high ammonia content of the dung acts as an antiseptic. The patterns engraved around the doorways may represent the surrounding furrowed fields. Ha Motenalapi, Lesotho, 2000
Click on image to enlarge or download Print Res (300dpi) PDF of this spread here
Tree house
left: Tree house in the South Tyrol Alps. Italy, 2003
right: Town house with Japanese black pine tree which also may act as a barrier to prevent people climbing over the outer wall. The curved structure is an inuyarai (a lightweight removable bamboo screen) to prevent rain splashes from the ground hitting the wall and causing the timber to rot. Kyoto, Japan, 2004
Click on image to enlarge or download Print Res (300dpi) PDF of this spread here
Extract from my architectural photography book, Drawing Parallels, Architecture Observed
Text & Photography © Quintin Lake, 2009
“Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.”
Mies van der Rohe
The organisation of space is the realm of both architect and photographer. The nature of space, and the very means by which we recognise it, is always fluid and transitory. The photographer not only recognises great established relationships between familiar structures and their environment, but also observes the constantly evolving realignments or mutations, which exist between tradition and modernity, as much as between manmade structures and nature. There are moments of random interaction between humanity and the great landscapes of the natural world where an almost instinctive relationship can be captured in something as simple as a workmen’s goal mouth by a highway. Barriers, enclosures, walls and routes are not just overt structures but unspoken strictures. These attempts at definition and containment speak of deeper cultural and political truths. By looking at them, by bringing them together, hidden realities and sinister webs of power are gradually revealed.
Absolute boundaries
left: Tourist viewing platformfor looking into North Korea from the South Korean side of the 38th parallel. Situated on top of Dorasan (Mount Dora), the observatory looks across the Demilitarized Zone. It is the part of South Korea closest to the North. Mount Dora, South Korea, 2007
right: Road barrier above a steep drop at the edge of a newly completed section of the Interoceanic Highway in the Peruvian Andes. Above Cuzco, Peru, 2008
Click on image to enlarge or download Print Res (300dpi) PDF of this spread here
Enveloping form
left: Scaffolding surrounding the second temple of Hera. The Greek Doric temple was built in about 450 BC. Paestum, Italy, 2001
right: Statue of Lenin at Sculpture Park (Fallen Monument Park), Moscow, Russia, 2007
Click on image to enlarge or download Print Res (300dpi) PDF of this spread here
Extract from my architectural photography book, Drawing Parallels, Architecture Observed
Text & Photography © Quintin Lake, 2009
