Week 2: Wednesday, 21st April. Today I explored the CBD of Tāmaki Makaurau as a detective early in the morning, and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, because I was surrounded with slightly less movement and traffic sounds.
I wanted to capture a different morning light, and experience the feel and mood of the place at the beginning of the working day. Although, the many construction workers in front of my camera appeared to have already clocked up a number of hours, and possibly needed their morning tea.
As I started to investigate my thematic concept: ‘Construct and Deconstruct Change’, I wondered if I could uncover new vistas as a detective. Suddenly I was a documentary detective photographer, lurking in alleyways, and choosing new pathways that I had never seen before. I followed the rearranged footpaths next to the Albert Street underground Railway Link construction space, and discovered and uncovered sites beneath the road.
The sound of the construction machinery was loud, and the workers were as busy as bees making a hive of reinforcing structural steel strips. I constantly tried to be safe and not get in the way, by looking this way and that, left and right, up and down, and I found corners where I could squeeze through to photograph. Machine noises were pumping in and out of time with each other.
On my city walk as a detective, I noticed a beautiful linear pattern within a smooth marble wall. I had fun changing my body stance into a lunge and snapped just twice. As the light was fairly dim here, I thought I was just photographing shiny grey marble with cream splashes, but I was surprised and intrigued to see my body reflection caught in a number of ways.
I uncovered other city sights of construction that I possibly would never have noticed previously. Looking up, I enjoyed witnessing vistas through see-through glass skylights framed within steel structured roof designs.
Stained coloured glass windows within churches, and contemporary glass artworks (see below), are soft and luminous. Beautiful light patterns and tonal shadows glow, and grow across other surfaces, creating a myriad of flickering colours. I am reminded of Aotearoa’s emerald rivers and forests when I see contemporary style buildings that have green coloured glass within black aluminium framed joinery.
I am interested in good design and architecture. There are many inspirational, international architects. Here are a few of my favourite with their unique buildings: (i.e. Charles-Édouard Le Corbusier: ‘Villa Savoye’, 1931, France / Philip Johnson: ‘The Glass House’, 1948-49, Connecticut, USA / Frank Lloyd Wright, ‘Fallingwater’, 1935, Pennsylvania, USA / Frank Gehry: ‘The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao’, 1997, Bilbao, Spain / Zaha Hadid: ‘Heydar Aliyev Centre’, 2007-12, Baku, Azerbaijan). A New Zealand architect firm and building that I admire is: Fearon Hay Architects, ‘Te Kaitaka — ‘The Cloak’.