About Off-Kilter
The photographs in Off-Kilter were created by viewing buildings and architectural details from uncommon angles – angles steep enough, or unusual enough, to push beyond their familiar, comforting shapes. Most of the structures and details photographed here are architecturally appealing subjects: a downtown tower surrounded by fog, the California State Capitol's dome, the riveted metal of a bridge’s tower seen from beneath, and an Elks lodge made of brick. Many of these images were created in the midday sun that architectural photographers often try to avoid. Both that time of day and the unusual visual perspective generate an off-kilter point of view that threads its way through the work – keeping viewers slightly off-balance.
Visually speaking, I am often interested in photographs where formal beauty and visual unease (whether subtle or pronounced) coexist. For example: a tower viewed straight up its corner edge becomes a wedge driven into the sky. When tightly cropped, the diamond pattern of a facade stops being the functional front of a building and becomes a somewhat abstract, flat geometric field – light on one panel, shadow on the next, the pattern carrying to the edge of the image’s frame. And by removing the functional visual cues that viewers typically use to identify a building (the ground, the entrance), the steep angle lets the structure register purely as form.