Urban Geometry: Finding Order in the City
March 20, 2024
The fire escape outside my first apartment in Bushwick was, in retrospect, my first geometry teacher. I spent two winters photographing that thing — the way the shadow bars crossed the brick at different angles throughout the day, the way snow sat in the grating and disappeared, the way rust created its own color gradient from top to bottom.
Urban photography is often reduced to "street photography with buildings." I think that misses something important. The city is a machine, and like any machine, it has underlying structures — rhythmic, geometric, mathematical — that become visible once you learn to look for them.
The Grammar of Facades
Every building face is a lesson in repeated elements: windows, bays, cornices, fire escapes, water towers, AC units bolted to window frames. Individually, these elements are mundane. In composition, they become patterns, and patterns create tension with irregularity.
The photograph I find most interesting isn't the perfectly symmetrical facade — it's the one with 11 identical windows and one that's been bricked up, or painted, or broken. The exception proves the rule and gives the eye somewhere to land.
Light as Geometry
In the city, light doesn't behave the way it does in nature. It bounces. It angles down through building gaps for 20 minutes a day and then disappears. It reflects off glass towers and creates secondary light sources on north-facing brick.
I've started keeping a notebook of locations annotated by time of day — not unusual for landscape photographers, but rare in street and urban work. Some of my best geometric images came from returning to a location I'd scouted three months earlier, knowing exactly when the light would cut through.
The brutalist architecture of the South Bronx has been a recurring subject — more on that soon.