Geometry, shadows and negative space

Last Sunday I helped paint Lucy’s flat, she has an apartment above her artist space and studio and it’s pretty big. Her living space was originally going to be an office, so it’s painted white. When we had finished it looked like a beautiful sea of white like a fresh fall of snow. So I got my camera out. The bannister's looked great, as did the white brickwork and curtain hoops all in white and when I took the contrast down even further they start to look like ghostly images.

Afterwards I was thinking about why I had taken the pictures, it’s not the first time I’ve taken images like this. In fact with an early Kodak digital camera, living in Bristol, it was the first artistic set of photographs I ever took. My bedroom had unusual ceiling plasterwork which created really interesting shapes and shadows. At the time I was going to use them to paint some pictures, but I never did. Since then I’ve shot pictures of the stainless steel ski slope roof at Vauxhall Station, motion blurred images of train tracks and quite obviously there is a whole theme of geometry, shadows and negative space going on in the images I like. Even my pictures of Spaceships are as much about the negative space they create as the buildings themselves.

I suppose my career as a Graphic Designer has a great deal to do with this, as a designer these kind of images are easy to work with if you are laying out copy or designing posters but there is something very comforting about choosing and shooting a geometric theme. The way you can get the same geometric proportions from vastly different scales and find the same pleasing space and negative space from totally random subjects is, I think, why I seem to come back to it again and again. I think it’s like slipping back into a comfort zone while I experiment and learn about new things.