Tuesday 25 October 2011

Art of concrete


Visiting another modernist treasure I came back to Trinity College campus. Beside already well known Berkeley Library stands much younger structure - Arts and Social Science building, designed also by ABK Architects (completed in 1978 as a result of competition in 1969)

Main Hall
Mysterious dark maze of corridors full of vertical and horizontal planes, amazing textures and ubiquitous fair-faced concrete. Truly beautiful building but at the same time very hard place to photograph. I will explain it at the end in “technicalities” section.
Building often used for conferences and public lectures includes also Douglas Hyde Gallery , the Lecky Library and several administrative offices. 
I had to split my visit into two days. An extra time was required to obtain permission to photograph Gallery due to current art exhibition. It's a very special place with amazing proportions and overall feeling which makes it work of art in itself.
I would like to thank to TCD's Communications Office, Gallery’s Curatorial Assistant and Gallery’s Director. Really appreciate all your help! Many thanks to security staff as well.

Douglas Hyde Gallery



... technicalities:
4x5 equipment It’s  a standard for this project. Calumet CC-400, Schneider-Kreuznach Super-Angulon 90mm 8.0 lens and  Fomapan 100@64 4x5 film developed later in my favourite recently Caffenol-c-m.
I mentioned above some technical dificulties during this session. Obviously this wonderful dim light (fantastic especially in such an amazing interior) filling the space is extremely hard to deal with when all photographs has to be neatly composed on rather dark view camera’s ground glass, looking through perfect but also dark Super-Angulon lens...f8

Settings for all shots were almost the same: f16 i 30sec exposure
After developing of negatives, scanning and first edition (with few bad surprises) I decided to come back to Douglas Hyde Gallery in order to recompose the most interesting for me photograph. It was actually this morning...third visit.

2 comments:

  1. Love this series Artur. The way you are showing modernist architecture is really interesting.
    Tom

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  2. Thanks a lot! i am very happy to hear that!

    ReplyDelete