A Fence

What drew me to make this photograph was not the fence itself, but the way it interacted with the geometry behind it. The wire grid overlays the diagonal of the concrete stair and handrail, creating a tension between rigid containment and directional movement. The eye wants to follow the slope upward, yet is repeatedly interrupted by the vertical and horizontal bars in the foreground.

In terms of composition, the alignment was deliberate. I positioned the frame so that the grid sat almost perfectly square, avoiding converging lines that would soften its structural authority. The diagonal cuts through the otherwise orthogonal arrangement, introducing a dynamic that stops the image from becoming static.

The choice of black and white helps strip the scene to pure form and texture. In colour, the image would risk distraction from surface tones or ambient hues; here, the concrete’s roughness, the shadowed recess, and the fine lines of the fence take precedence. Exposure was balanced to preserve detail in both the highlights on the stair’s face and the deep shadows in the background void — a necessity to keep the image from collapsing into flat greys.

This is less about documenting an object than distilling an arrangement of shapes into a visual statement. The fence does not only obscure; it becomes part of the composition’s language, both dividing and unifying the scene.