Sacred And Secular, 2009

Sacred and Secular is an ongoing series of photographs that depict urban edge conditions and built environments throughout the world.  In the course of Western architecture and urbanism there is a long history attached to the Ideal, Visionary and the Fantastic as notions to create built space. This lineage is studied from a distant vantage point at the cities edge – looking out and looking in. Taken across the globe, the locations of the images are often distant in latitude, typology and syntax.   Commencing with the category defying works of 21ts century “Starchitects” and including recent or ancient manifestations in Dubai, Egypt, China, Japan Greenland, Antarctica, Europe and Canada.

Inspired by my personal experiences as a traveler the images serve to illustrate the often unpredictable link between intention and perception – implying that memory and experience play significant roles in our ability to perceive and thus give meaning to the world around us.

Printed as large format prints, they share a formal device of implied pathways or literal axis of movements between each image. Each edge condition photographed can be, metaphorically speaking, read as the DNA for whatever city/settlement is contained within the image. Earth, air and water are rendered large and neutral  – an infinite field on which we build and transform the landscape. Conversely that which we build is depicted as thin, delicate, sometimes cumbersome and without beginning or end.

The images are photographed with an 8”x10” view camera and printed as chromogenic color prints, Each image offers a finely grained density of visual information, rendered in the broad range of tonality only made possible by the 8”x10” inch transparency, Transmounted to Plexiglass the photographs are printed large  – thereby welcoming the viewer to experience them from afar and at nose length.