Tag Archives: modern

Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Courtyard, MOMA

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Courtyard, MOMA
Courtyard, MOMA

Courtyard, MOMA. New York City. August 18, 2010. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Black and white photograph of the courtyard of the New York’s Museum of Modern Art, photographed through windows of the museum.

Sticking with the urban New York theme for at least one more day, this is another photograph shot from a window in the Museum of Modern Art and looking out over a courtyard and architecturally busy urban scene combining older brick and stone facade buildings with more modern and taller buildings.

There are subtle (or perhaps not so subtle?) reflections in the window through which I made the photograph. These reflections are one reason, though not the only one, that I decided to render this as a black and white image – some of the shadows had colorations that did not work for me. To my mind, this photograph is related to some others that I’ve made featuring views of and through the windows of modern buildings, including this photograph from the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

Windows, MOMA

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Windows, MOMA
Windows, MOMA

Windows, MOMA. New York, New York. August 18, 2010. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A scene consisting almost entirely of windows and secondary reflected subjects, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Look closely and you’ll perhaps see that this is not quite what it might first appear to be. It is something of a visual trick or joke on one level. It is some other things, too.

The bottom line is that almost nothing in this scene is actually where it appears to be or even what it appears to be. The shot was made through an upstairs window of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the vertical shapes are the window frame and a bit of the interior wall at the far right, with some diagonal elements of the frame at top and bottom. But the “scene” outside is entirely reflected in the windows of the adjacent building – this is actually a photograph of a single glass-walled building, not exactly a photograph of an urban scene with buildings and trees and sidewalks and people – those are all reflections in the glass of the building. Obviously, I was also having some fun with perspective lines going off in a range of different directions – the window frame lines converging to the right, the outside perspective lines converging toward the left, and the converging lines on the reflected buildings headed back to the right. There’s more, but I’ll probably get lost if I try to describe it. A close inspection – easier with the print than in this little jpg – reveals some other odd stuff here and there: double images of some of the reflected buildings, some warping and bending of those shapes, people scattered around the courtyard and some moving figures that are barely visible.

G Dan Mitchell Photography | Flickr | Twitter (follow me) | Facebook (“Like” my page) | LinkedIn | Email
Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.


Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: New York City, Photographs: People, Photographs: Structures and Objects, Photographs: Urban/Street

People on Walkway, MoMA

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People on Walkway, MoMA
People on Walkway, MoMA

People on Walkway, MoMA. Museum of Modern Art, New York City. August 18, 2010. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

People walking quickly along elevated walkway at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Shooting hand-held and at a very low shutter speed while visiting the museum, I made a series of exposures looking down into the space of the museum with the many criss-crossing walkways and other structural forms lit by a combination of light coming from nearby windows and artificial lighting, in which the people moving through the space are blurred by their rapid motion.

Although I suppose that a lot of my landscape/architecture photographs tend toward high resolution, detail, and sharpness I’m also fond of photographs that eschew that stuff! This image combines several things that interest me quite a bit. One, not surprisingly perhaps, is the view of the urban world as its own type of landscape – my interest in landscape is not limited to only those of the natural world. I’m also fascinated by forms and shapes, especially those formed in this kind of constructed environment. And, finally perhaps, I have this idea that I explore from time to time of contrasting the fixed and solid objects of the man-made world with the transient and dynamic motion of its inhabitants.

This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Structures and Objects

Portal, Wall, and Cable

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Portal, Wall, and Cable
Portal, Wall, and Cable

Portal, Wall, and Cable. New York, New York. August 18, 2010. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Looking through a portal in a yellow wall towards a white wall beyond, lit by diffused light.

This is almost, but perhaps not quite, a “photograph of nothing.” As we walked through this New York City museum I was distracted by the way the light hit different surfaces, especially because the light was especially diffused on this cloudy morning – and I was intrigued by the juxtapositions of different colors and shapes and types of lighting that I could find as I moved through this space. This minimalist image consists of an open portal with what must be a safety cable along the bottom sill, with a large room with white walls beyond, and another similar portal and a corner breaking up the white walls near the left side of the image.

Ideally it would be best to shoot this from a tripod at low ISO and a long shutter speed and perhaps with a prime. However, here I had to improvise, shooting hand held at 1/20 second (yay for IS!) with a zoom lens that required some distortion correction in post.

G Dan Mitchell Photography | Flickr | Twitter (follow me) | Facebook (“Like” my page) | LinkedIn | Email
Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.