Architecture nominee

I thought of starting this project in late 2015 after a long time spent questioning myself about what I actually loved about photography and what my long term goals would have been. Driven by my passion for modern arts, maths, and progressive music, I decided to use photography as a mean to create abstract images. My goal was to build upon and, in a way, recreate the massive work of such twentieth-century painters as Klee, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevič, Stella and many others. When I go shooting, I first seek ordinate patterns, complementary colours, straight lines, and sequences, then I suddenly break them by introducing either some natural elements such as sky, clouds, and birds or contrasting chromatisms and shapes. Abstract Cities is, therefore, a collection of abstract shots in which I try to use this “geometry” model to extract contemporary buildings from a chaotic and often uninteresting urban context. Each image should then bring the observer back to the abstractionists canvasses, gauging the brushstrokes of the early twentieth century with today's digital imaging.

I started taking pictures with a DSLR camera in late 2012. I was going through a rather difficult moment, and I thought that throwing myself headlong into a new hobby would have somehow helped to get out of the quagmire. That’s what eventually happened. Unsurprisingly, I approached photography the way everybody typically does: by some taking random shots of people, landscape, flowers, etc. For quite a few months I tried hard to make my way out of an ocean of different categories and styles, seeking to understand which one I liked the most. I can’t say that it wasn’t a bit frustrating at the beginning. However, it was not long before I got passionate about cityscapes and, in particular, architectural photography. Since the beginning, I have always placed a great emphasis on modern buildings such as skyscrapers, futuristic residential estates, contemporarily designed shopping malls, etc. In particular, I would shoot both details and entire figures black and white, possibly using very long shutter speed to create a distressing and abstract mood. I recently decided to bring colors back into my shots while cutting out all the unnecessary details that might distract from the core artistic message.