‘Drawing Parallels’ is a great book on architectural photography by the photographer Quintin Lake. It includes many pairs of photos from all over the world and focuses on architectural details or concepts which visually weave together unrelated places, such as the corridor between the apartments in France and a metro station in Russia; neon sign in China and glazed tile of 13th Century shrine in Iran; or windows on the facade of State Kremlin Palace and ‘Gherkin’ building in London.
"The photographer not only recognizes great established relationships between familiar structures and their environment, but also observes the constantly evolving realignments or mutations, which exist between tradition and modernity, as much as between manmade structures and nature".
The author sheds some light on the basic principles of visual associations, and gives examples of how it can enough to just notice subtly similar shapes, from one small detail to an overall impression, to find parallels between two buildings or places.
“...part of the art of photography is seeing and registering the wealth of changing forms and patterns that are created by the harmony and clash of buildings with their environments”.
And sometimes it is more about the surface and texture through which we discover subtle resemblance between aluminium sunscreens of the modern theatre and roof tiles of an alpine hay barn.
These moments of recognizing something familiar in something alien helps to understand some principles that lay in foundation of man-altered landscapes and can be observed all over the human-built world.
Sources:
Lake, Q 2009, Drawing parallels: architecture observed, Papadakis, Berkshire
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