Photographic project with architectural dimentions.  Taken over the four seasons, two floors of floor-to-ceiling photographic murals architectural in scale become part of the space, creating a sense of environment that goes beyond architectural limitation. 

2 Architectural Environments

Photographs of architectural scale required the ultra-sharp images of my 8”x10” view camera and Red Dot Artar lens all mounted on a heavy tripod lugged through rivers and woods and set up at beautiful places in Southern Ontario through the changes of seasons to do justice to the theme of the client's Four Seasons Hotels.  Including mosquito bites standing half stripped in rapids.

Shapes and Barns: Poster, Exhibition, Ulm, Germany 1979

3  Barns

The Architecture of Barns has always fascinated me, eventually buying an old one in Peterboro County, to watch it crumble over the years, and later rebuilding another barn on its old stone foundations at Wolf Hill. My photography of barns often reduces the image to its simplest elements, barn and sky, barn and earth, huge masses against sky, the sky squeezed between edges of the frame and the outline of the building.  Here, the surrounding sky / the negative area, becomes a powerful compositional force.  Next come the textures of surface, then the chiaroscuro of sunlit and shade, inside and outside spaces where often the openings of barns become powerful elements.  In all, their simplicity of shape and their structural, formal, practical forthrightness of expression have always made barns a powerful fascination... inside & outside.

Landscapes & Barns: Barn open to sky, Southern Ontario 2009

Exhibition of MM’s photographic work, Isaacs Gallery, Toronto Canada, circa 1959

4  Shows, Exhibitions, Lectures

(more to be included here)

An important part of my earlier work concerned photography of architecture in Toronto, Canada.  The fine residential older city architecture and newer work commissioned by Toronto Arohitects and also Canadian Architect Magazine, Anthony Jackson Ed.

Photographing architecture is my best way to think about and examine architecture, as in the careful choosing of the most illuminating and engaging aspects of a single house or building, as well as in the  careful, patient and observant composition of the photograph which brings to light qualities of its

Irving Grossman Architect: Shaarei Tzedek Synagogue,

Toronto, Ontario.  Structural Engineer Morden Yolles. Canadian Architect Mag.

Jerome Markson Architect: Wwide exterior view of Moses House, night, Hamilton Ontario / Canadian Architect Mag.

1 Architectural Photography

(cont) tants, the times of day, orientation to the sun... all reduced to singularities, abstractions, subtractions of  a much larger, more entire experience.

Photography becomes a form of architectural analysis: one looks at things one at a time, out context: one considers singularities.  One could avoid these limitations by making wide-angle movies, the camera moving through the spaces, through changing times of day, stopping to inhabit the surroundings, simulating the inhabitant’s actual, living experience.  But these are the considerations that the Architect must conjure up when he is doing his plans.  How could a still photograph ever come close to the experience of being there?

form, massing, space, proportion, texture, light modulationt.

Photography promotes and stimulates the art of understanding architecture, in seeing architecture out of context for a moment.  The photograph isolates architecture into flat , fixed representation, thus losing the effects of the depth dimension, contexts of sound, the contexts of space, one’s movement through space, comings and goings, the varying powers of light through windows, the always-changing  points of view of the inhabit-

1: Architectural Photography

2: Photographic Environments: Inn on The Park, Four Seasons Hotels

3: Barns

4: Shows, Exhibitions, Lectures (to be completed)

© Morley Markson

© Morley Markson

More Photography, Photography into Architecture &.....