The Beginning:

I started taking abstract photographs as a high schooler, without knowledge that I was taking abstract photographs. The figure above, for instance; I was drawn to the texture of the wheel, and the curve that light was making against the deep black of the wheel-well behind. I don’t exactly remember the editing process, but I do know I was focused on the crop/composition and bringing out the highlights and texture of the the tread.

For years, I had always looked at the patterns and shapes, textures and colors/values of objects: what fascinated me was the order one can find in these chaotic environments, and, conversely, the confusion one can find in ordered environments. The lighting instills a certain amount of drama, but the photograph is also flat enough to feel graphic, and hard-edged in some spots, which I find to be characteristic of a lot of my newer stuff. I didn’t even have the words for it at this point (I think this was either sophomore or junior year in high school, before I had learned any of the art/design terminology), but I was being drawn to the things that I am still drawn to today: shape, texture, value (light/dark), juxtaposition and repetition.

First Abstract portfolio:

I worked really hard on this portfolio, and am pretty pleased with how several of the pieces came out; particularly this first one, Abstraction 12. A lot of my abstraction work during junior year in college was inspired by artists like M.C Escher, Peter Sieger, and Piet Mondrian — especially Mondrian, whose work with color theory had serious impact on this photograph, looking back. There is an almost grid like structure set up by the lines on the walls, and the splashes of primary colors keep the eye circulating from one to the next: red, being the highest key color, weighing the eye down on bottom; the lines on the wall leading to the yellow on the right, slightly less high key, to pull the eye away; the vertical line on the yellow wall pushing the eye up towards blue sky, flat and low key, on the top right which lets the eye breathe; and finally the white of the center line lead the eye back to the horizontal lines on the silver wall, to the vertical line, and back down to the patch of red.

I broke the rules in the photograph below: oopsies. The rule I broke is that I have a vertical line splitting the photograph in half: most photographers tell you not to do this, simply because it creates a “black hole” of tension, as it were, in the center of the photograph, and the important subject matter falls to the background. The thing is, when the photograph is all objects, and there is no subject, it is these points of interaction between the objects that we find tension: in my mind, it justified breaking the rules a little bit. The reason breaking the rules worked with this project, in my mind, is because of the color schemes I used. With a lot of these photographs, the thought in the back of my head is that I wanted to sort of annoy the viewer at points: I was struggling to piss off the eyes, in a way. I wanted to create illusion, struggle, and dramatic tension through the movement, values, and colors of different geometric shapes — below, for example.

Oddly enough, it also adheres to mathematical order fairly strictly, considering its odd look. From composition to colors, this photograph is all math: geometric shapes, mathematically calculated colors, gridded layout, a perfectly split picture area. The most interesting part of this photograph in my mind, though, is that I used a formula to calculate the RGB values of different colors that were already in the photograph (the blue on the right building, the black on the left building), and used those colors to find complementary and tertiary colors to go along with those first colors. This is the source I used, and I would highly recommend it to any color nerds out there: it will get you a perfect color scheme every time. I chose these colors in particular because they help distract from the “black-hole” effect of that center line in that they are unique and surprising, while also remaining soft enough to let the eye float around, and rest.

One of the most used tools in this project, I found, was something called the spot healing brush. For those of you unfamiliar, the spot healing brush is a tool you can use in photoshop. What happens, is your cursor turns into the little circle that you can size up and down; it sources the image area around the circle of your cursor, and replaces the area inside the circle with a composite image of the stuff around it. It’s a super helpful tool for removing dust, cracks, telephone poles, hair, etc., and I used it near-endlessly.

In this photograph for example, Abstraction 19, there are many juxtapositions of line (the window lines and the ceiling lines), shape (the hexagon made of two arrow-shaped pentagonal shadows, in the center of the photograph), and the reflections in the bottom left corner. All of this repetition, and juxtaposition, is very thought-out, and planned to a tee: before edits, there were many reflections that were sloppy or refracted, or dust/cracks/lines, and I had to decide whether or not to keep them.

My first step, as with all of these pictures, was to zoom in 150%, and take out any and all dust in sight (I will speak a bit more about why, later). I then went through, and looked at the reflections in the windows on the far right side, which, beforehand, were a mix of colors and lines. I had to decide how much movement I wanted in that bottom left corner: I couldn’t let the highlights be too bright, or the movement to be too stirring, because it would distract the eye from the main reflections, in the blue ceiling panels. In addition, there were many more refractions and rays spread across the ceiling before edits, which I removed as well. I wasn’t sure why I was doing this: I just knew that I wanted the illusions to be seen clearly as possible, without dust or dirt or cracks or any telling/guiding reflections to mess up the view. That was the initial impulse, and in the project I am working on now, I am trying to push this impulse towards the next step.

Hindsight:

My natural tendency with this whole project was to take buildings which looked modern, and make them absolutely perfect using the photoshop tools: at the same time, I was trying to create illusions out of these places that are so smooth, and perfect looking.

After the year was over, I continued to take abstract photographs: I thought about what this really simple series of impulses, reasons and outcomes could mean: I tried to figure out what I was trying to figure out. It only finally clicked into place when I was angrily arguing with someone from England on Facebook, about God knows what. All I know is we were both angry, both being immature, passive aggressive, arguing as if we already knew we were right (as most social media arguments go.) And it was so random — one of those things that shouldn’t have mattered, but did — because a childhood thought had been pushed a step further.

It seemed too particular, too acute, too specific: and this is sourced from a feeling and thought that has been on my chest/mind since childhood: why me, and why this person, why this place, this time, this now, instead of anyone, anywhere, anytime, else? Out of the billions and billions of webs, tangled and intermingling across the internet, and across the space-time of the real world, what are the odds of my fate crossing with this other’s, however distant, however close, in such a circumstance as this? What is the significance? Why the hell was I arguing with this random face on a screen — an argument of absolutely no consequence — as if it were a fight for my life? What was I fighting to uphold? Who was there to impress, to defend, except for myself?

At that point, a series of free associations set off in my mind that caused me to step back from everything for awhile. I realized that there was certainly an element of image, pride, ego, involved in my perception of the world, and the way I present myself to the world: I feel this is how we all operate, voluntarily or otherwise. And the very next second, in a surge of discomfort, I saw my own hypocrisies, my paradoxes, my false beliefs, flash across the computer screen in front of me, reflecting back an image of myself in the eyes of the person I was arguing with.

That was the day it clicked: I was photographing these ordered structures, cleaning up their surfaces to present no suspicion of what was hiding right in front of the viewer: illusions and reflections and falsities to be found only under close, careful inspection. These are straw men photographs — the straw men realities I, we, build for ourselves. These photographs are a lot like the internet, in some respects; they appear so normal, so decipherable and clear, so familiar, at first, until you realize that you aren’t looking at what you thought you were looking at. Even in this project, when you think you know what you’re looking at, the photograph has been altered in some way, by the photographer (me), and is therefore an illusion: the world-views we create for ourselves are complex combinations of the beliefs we've been told by others that we accept without questioning, and the subjective influences of ourselves, and especially others, which lessen our true understandings of others, and the world around us.

Marching On:

These are the things I had been trying to say for so long in my writing, and they had been right there in front of me the whole time in my abstract photography work: I was searching for a way to communicate the absurdity of everyday life, and trying to cloak the absurd/paradoxical in either flashy (entertaining/image-obsessed) or mundane (dull, banal) dressings, as a distraction from the inherent flaws. These photographs are representative of not only the current state of society, but all of society, as I see it: a complex string of half-truths and self-deceit, inter-personal deceit, and truths left unsaid, all delivered through the accepted/acceptable cultural vehicle of that time (for us, the modern, straight forward, "elegant" style). I realized in hindsight that these photographs were really about identity, and the psychology of social interaction: how we pick and choose our own illusory versions of ourselves, of our realities, through the beliefs and thoughts we are told, or have, that go unexamined. In the future, I want to explore this idea closer in my photography, but, more so, I want to explore these principles when applied to my fiction writing: I want to figure out, in more explicit terms, the ways that people build images of themselves, and the passivity that is involved in building an identity (i.e. allowing yourself to believe in the illusions you create, or the things you are told by others, about the world). The same way that these photographs would seem really bland and straightforward without closer, more careful inspection, the lives of millions of people are experienced in the same, half-assed way via the internet, generalizations, and especially in person: we use people as statistics, as stereotypes, as evidence in arguments, as examples to point to in conversations; all as if none of them had any trace of complexity beneath those initial, surface-level impressions and figures.

Check out my website to view more work, to inquire inquire about jobs/commissions, or to get in touch for further conversation:

http://joshua-colby.squarespace.com/photography-1/