Fragments

Much of my work in photography has the been the exploration of the built environment or a juxtaposition of the natural versus the man- made environment.

Facades was my first outing looking the textures and patterns of man-made walls and natural walls. I live in Calgary which is modern evolving city which since the 1970’s has turned its back on the past and has marched resolutely forward. Nowhere has this been more evident in its architecture. In the early 1990’s, I chose to look back as the past was disappearing and documented Calgary’s first building boom from the late 19th century until the 1920’s in the form of the sandstone buildings. At one time there were a couple of hundred sandstone buildings and now less than fifty. Calgary grew slowly over the next fifty years until the mid-70’s when another oil boom took hold. Interestingly, I was part of that boom as in my professional life I sold the materials for the glass towers that sprung up during that period.

Sandstones, the resulting body of work was an easy one to do as it was self-defining and specific. However, there remained all this new architecture mostly glass and aluminum all crammed into Calgarys’ small downtown core. This is also my environment but I was unsure how to engage with it and represent it as an artist. The answer came to me through my car windshield.

The builders of these towers view them individually, independent their surroundings for the most part. However, that is not how we view them, especially from ground level. We see them as a collage of overlapping surfaces and textures. This was the lesson of the car windshield which looks at everything horizontally not vertically. In large cities with a concentration of office towers this is how we see this environment and how I have photographed them.

Most of the images in this series come from Calgary which again is going through another rapid change but there also images from other large centres such as Hong Kong, Montreal and – Regina.

Ray Van Nes