Based on my ongoing Barcelona “Structures” project, here is a brief photo essay I put together during a recent trip to Seattle, in the USA’s Pacific Northwest. Is this a story of great achievement… of hubris… or both?
Identifiable Boeing Flying Objects, clouds, the sky, and the American flag figure in many of these pictures, as well as myriad patterns, shapes, and forms.
What you don’t see in these photos? The 12,000+ homeless people who live in Seattle, many in tent camps–a few pitched quite literally and squalidly in the median between the interstate highway multi-lanes.
So, enjoy all the modern glass, aluminum, and steel in these images… but also give some thought to what these photographs don’t show. Or, would show if I were to point my camera into the alleys, heating grates, recesses and crannies at the base of these buildings rather than up at the distant, shiny, summit altars.
Who said that?
I heard this somewhere long ago in a galaxy far, far away and it’s a powerful point to ponder: “A society ought to be judged by how it treats its less fortunate.”
[Just checked with the all-knowing Sra. Google. It was Mahatma Ghandi–of course–who came up with the original: “A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members.”]
With that, on to the images. These are all sized to 30″x20″ (or 20″x30″ in vertical orientation) at 300ppi. That’s 9000 pixels by 6000 pixels, so they can be printed quite large–going to 60″x40″ easily. I would even consider a wall mural, depending on the viewing distance.
An alien shadow, perhaps?
High key treatment of lines, shapes, and forms:
Is that a monster, quietly observing our strange human activities from the sky?
Millions of years before Boeing, there were…
Reflecting on dual and opposing flags:
Boeing, or Airbus? Test your aircraft identification skills:
Three flying objects and three rising structures:
A LGBQT celebration of a flyover:
Boeing, an all-American company:
Just half of a flag, lost in lines:
Patterns:
Urban climbers…well, descenders, actually…cleaning as they go:
More patterns for Kafka:
A close-up of our three descenders:
Still more patterns–and a stray trapped plastic bag, and a weird ring of some kind:
“An Orca’s Nightmare”, or “Industrial Orca”, perhaps?
The pensive princess of Seattle:
The Wheel and some big tubes:
Folks at work–on the rooftop, in the plane, and in those offices, surely:
Hello World, Seattle branch:
Hotel from times past, now hidden deep in the urban canyons of downtown:
Patterns, lines, shapes, forms:
Our modern idol, urban obelisk:
Older and newer, with rhyming flag and streetlight:
A selection of four images from the Pop Museum, near the Space Needle:
On final approach to SEA:
Finally, two wider cityscapes, taken from the top of the Space Needle (hint: shoot through the open space between the plexiglass panels). Lots of lines here, as well as a full tonal range when rendered in monochrome:
