Photography (I'm finding) is partly a process of making images (fairly intuitively) and then struggling to assign meaning to images and groups of images. It's not that the "meaning" (whatever that means) is "made up" after the fact, it's that articulating it and presenting it coherently is a struggle.
That's been very much the case for these photos I call "elevations", which I've been taking for a couple of years but hadn't really wrapped my head around. So here are some of the images, and an attempt to justify them:
In architecture, an elevation is a drawing of the outside of a building as a flat surface, without perspective lines, as if viewed from an infinite distance. An elevation shows the proportions and measurements of a facade. Like a photograph, it shows an order that will never be directly experienced, but adds to our understanding (and sense of control) of an unfamiliar subject.
Photography is not a process of passively absorbing and recording visual order; as photographers we impose an order, and the order we impose is founded in learned aesthetic norms: symmetry, rhythm, proportion, orthogonality. If a line is level, it's because it should be level; if a line is skewed, it's skewed by reference to a level line.
Photography can be used remarkably effectively to imagine or recall a place or experience. But in these images, the camera is a tool for imposing order; it provides a level of control over an unfamiliar environment (as well as an excuse to be there). Though they leave no trace behind, these photographs are a way for an outsider to impose order and gain control. They are neither experiential nor documentary.
Like an architectural elevation, each of these images is an artificial view; they're personal, but through strong formal elements they amplify the detachment that the camera always interposes, preventing us from ever fully recreating an experience or truly documenting something. This is reinforced by orthogonal perspectives, strong lines, rigid framing, simple or complex symmetries, and figural or symbolic treatment of subjects.
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