David Burdeny

March 2nd - April 2nd, 2023

After 15 years of working with conventional perspective as a way to represent space, Burdeny presents differing urban landscapes using explorative camera and editing techniques. Widely known for his ability to capture the essence of a place and its people in a single image, these new photographs introduce both a visual feast for the eyes and a contemplative experience for the mind.

“Photographed in Italy, Morocco and France in the spring of 2022, City On A Hill was captured with a medium format digital camera fitted with a super telephoto lens. “I was interested in an alternative method that was more sympathetic to the unexpected ways in which people adapted to and reconfigured these unique environments. The resultant image compresses the city’s depth into a two dimensional surface revealing the interconnectedness between its structures and the invisible actors that generated it.”

“Photographed in Tokyo and Kyoto during the fall of 2022, Artifact is presented as a catalogue of figure ground studies. Individual buildings have been digitally extracted and superfluous details have been removed and recomposed over a field of colour. Buildings in Tokyo often stand isolated by scale, purpose, and aesthetics – indifferent to their surroundings but proud of where they are. Gas stations exist next to temples, while old wooden houses sit between new concrete hotels. In the context of my previous work, here it is less about making a conventional image and more about addressing what we are seeing and how we see it. They have become reverse architectural drawings and in a way, more intimate and closer in experience.