straight lines, right angles – life in business

The business parks and commercial estates lining the edges of our expanding cities may look sterile and and ruthless, with their discount monotony of straight lines, right angles, off the shelf building components, and apparent transience. Yet, they represent the lifelines of our cities, pumping goods and services into their markets and our lives. maintaining their “health”, and removing the damaged, outdated and no longer useful. In that sense, urban design resembles the Centre George Pompidou, with its ducts and vents, water, waste and electrical supplies lines all on the outside of the building, the inside reserved for the presentation of art (and good taste) as in our gentrifying urban landscapes.

I have written about my fascination with these places before. In spite of their seeming emptiness, millions of lives are reflected in them, their hopes and aspirations, worries and challenges assessed, priced and served within the framework of economic calculations pervading all aspects of our lives. Photographing these places in their own right already seems to be a worthwhile undertaking, as I find myself drawn to their formal qualities of efficient angular order and its disruption by the anarchistic forces of nature, technical failure or human error. Yet, I enjoy playing with these pictures, appropriating the charmless austerity of these business parks, manipulating colors and inserting personal images, reclaiming them for myself.

These are no more than three early drafts in a series that is evolving as it goes along (and may never go anywhere in the end). It may be the first time that I have started on a series so thoroughly without an idea where it may lead, both aesthetically and in terms of its exact content. For a “solution focus” guy like me, that surely represents progress (I hope)?