artist journal - diVISION - Architectural Sights of Contestation - a series of photographs based on the camera frame - © Lloyd Godman

Architectural Sights of Contestation

Shooting photographs for Drawing for Nature, I became interested in architecture, how the structures we build create their own landscapes, and interact with the natural surroundings. How the taller they get the stranger the holes in the sky become. How the shapes leave openings to the heavens.

I first experimented with this technique of shooting two images of the same scene while on Stewart Island en route to the Auckland Islands for the Codes of Survival project. I was interested how the process of isolating a subject in the camera viewfinder left other elements of the scene unseen. I have been fascinated for a long time with repetitive aspects of a scene from one image to another - ( I first used this in The Last Rivers Song, Secrets of the Forgotten Tapu and Body Symbols.

Over a period of time, I developed the technique further of shooting two vertical images of the places I visited. Most images were shot with a 40mm lens on a 6x6 format with out a tripod. Rather than produce perfectly aligned images, the visual discrepancies that arose are seen as part of the ideas behind the images. I was also intrigued by the perspective distortion the the edge of the frame from the wide angle lens.

Architechture - plan, side, end, oblique elevations - no skyward elevation.

This interest in architecture later inspired the Acute project.