NZ Visual Diary - entry 347

light play - Commercial Bay

When, more than a decade ago, I created my photography website — DoubleTake Photography — I elected to categorise my photographs within three folders: architecture; landscape; and streetscape. What (!) no space for portrait photography? I was not then (and am not now) a studio portrait photographer, and my portrait photography has always felt more like a valorised sub-set of street photography than formal portraiture, so the 3 categories seemed sufficient.

Today’s photographic entry, given the tyranny of a rigid tripartite schema, presented a quandary: was the image best subsumed under street or architecture photography?

My thought process . . .

I was pleased to have waited patiently for the choreography of unscripted mall shoppers to find their places on my visual stage. As such, at the moment that I pressed the shutter button on my camera, the image had the feel of a streetscape (atrium-scape is too silly, even for me).

But the transient players on my stage were not the elements that first attracted my attention. The interplay of architecture and light had top billing.

The high art in architecture, in my opinion, is how architects understand and demonstrate through grand design that light is meant to caress the exteriors and envelope the interiors of buildings. The atrium located at Commercial Bay in city-centre Auckland does a splendid job of creating a stage on which light is encourage to frolic.

Finally, few architects whose work I have studied do a better job of inviting light to play and dance on and in their buildings than Zaha Hadid.