When shooting this week’s series of photos I was trying to find a sort of balance between the more abstract work that I ordinarily lean toward, and more straight urban landscape. Although I’m not sure if I succeeded in that respect, I did end up yielding some of my favorite images from my more recent work and I like to think that I was able to recapture a facet of my approach that I’d thought I lost; and nothing beats the feeling of completing work that you are completely satisfied with. Despite the fact that it was unintentional at first, I ended up using natural lines to bisect the frame, fairly drastically, on nearly all of the images, causing a strong contrast of textures and values. I think these examples really showcase how appropriate this area is for this sort of thing, downtown Scranton is full of buildings and structures of a pretty wide variety of ages and its interesting to see the way they all interact in the skyline, a part of this area that is perhaps underrated.

Walking around downtown, I was unsure of what exactly it would be that I wanted this project to be about. We had the freedom to do whatever we pleased as long as it followed some sort of theme; I had known that I wanted to focus on local architecture, but I was unsure if I wanted it to be just a documentary project, or if I wanted to take a different approach. So I decided to just start shooting. Immediately I found that I was drawn to the forms being created by the interaction between the negative space of the sky, and the outlines of the tops of buildings as well as the sort of dynamic light and shadows that only occur in an urban environment where the buildings aren’t that large, but aren’t exactly small either.  Although I had shot in and around downtown Scranton quite a few times before, there was just something about that day that gave me a different attitude toward this place as a subject for photography.

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