So, here I am at the Flying Cloud Academy Vintage Dance week hosted at Northern Kentucky University (NKU) and playing truant from most of the day’s exhausting dance workshops. I suspect that the campus was first developed with new buildings in the early 70’s. At least, the brutalist architecture leads me to suspect this. Reminiscent of the many concrete excrescences that litter the former Союз Советских Социалистических Республик (ie USSR), for example this theatre in Novgorod, Russia :
, many of the buildings on the NKU campus look as though they have been washed up by some apocalyptic tidal wave and deposited there. Attempts are made to soften the ambience with trees and other leafy foliage with variable amounts of success. The “Health Innovation Center” [sic] where we had some of the dancing workshops abuts the gigantic Science building possessing the form of a prehistoric stranded cetacean. However, the architects have done some clever things with this space and , in turn, I have taken some different views on what can be appreciated.
First, in colour :
The first two are looking upwards at the skylight & then from the third floor I’m looking down on Erica. This latter photo I like a lot and may well enter a print into an exhibition (eg R.A.M or Minnetrista).
But the fun is with the monochrome :
#4 & #5 have had some judicious rotating and cropping; personally I like the shapes and lines that you can get with black&white. Number 5 for example doesn’t give one many clues about what is actually there and how far away it is. However, it’s #6 that a winner for me. As before the monochrome treatment removes colour which in this case I judged to be too revealing & superfluous. From the right side, the background feature seems to meld into the ‘cage’ and then disappear, and what is this strange structure anyway? Thus the abstraction is effected successfully.
The shade shelters have a mesh which allows light to pass though but dissipates it enough to provide relief. Focussing through such a mesh at the brutalist building behind we obtain an image such as #7, which can perhaps be described as a combination of Mondrian expressionism + pointillist execution + Bauhaus sensibility.
Image #8 was taken in an early morning mist, right? Not quite. Actually, the camera lens misted up badly in the humid heat when I took it outside; I snapped this image before the condensation evaporated.
The final set of images are all about shadows and lines; see if you can figure out what is making the shadows in each of these shots.
Not too difficult now, was it? These images were taken over four days of strolling around the N.K.U campus in the mid-June heat and I was thankful for both the opportunity to do this and the open nature of the university campus with its photogenic vistas.
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