Park Reopened

For the past few months I've periodically walked past 303 Plaza on Second Street. The plaza has been remodeled with a new fountain and new sculpture (newer than the Google Earth image, anyway.) Thursday was the first time I saw it open, so I jumped at the chance to photograph it. The main lesson learned is I need to go back with a wider lens.


One nice thing about abstract sculptures is that, on film, they become different from their shapes. Their three-dimensional nature, compressed into two dimensions, becomes a perspective and depth trick that makes the shapes something other than they appear to be in person. Monochrome amplifies that by removing color and convering shadows to tones and contrasts.


Here, certainly, one can tell that the sculpture moves away from the camera at quite a steep angle. But the perspective, depth, and lack of color serve to confuse the sculpture's actual height, be it a few feet or more than 20 feet.


Simply shape and form. Three-dimensional objects made flat become abstractions of the actual subject. Certainly this is a photograph of the subject but it is not the subject any more than thinking about eating a doughnut is actually eating a doughnut.


Monochrome can make anything an abstraction. Robbed of color, this polished-flat surface takes on a craggy, textured appearance as though it had fractured instead of having been cut.