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On Insincerity
This is a rant. It was caused by the umpteenth self-promotional, vertically shot from above video made toting a smartphone, in which, after the hideous opening — ‘hey guys’ — the main, and only, character promotes a personal achievement while pretending merely to ‘share a — God forbid — thought’. I usually try to be factual in my writing, stating my case in a clear and concise manner, always focusing on the merits of an issue and never blaming a person or a category. But.
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One Shot (Plus One) Story – All That Lasts
These three bags of rubble are all that remains of a ‘renovated’ building. By chance, though, I took a photo of the building as it was being demolished. The difference in the colours of the rooms caught my attention. I wondered why people had chosen to paint each room in different colours. Maybe the blue was for the children? And the green was for the kitchen? And what about the red and the yellow? These colours tell the story of a family, a story that just ended when their home was demolished.
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A Hellish Look
It is quite common these days to see images of various kinds using the facade of a building as a screen. In the case of government or state buildings, a flag appears out of nowhere after dusk.The overall effect is quite spectacular, especially in Italy where the palaces of power are beautiful works of art. However, when photographed with a narrow field of view, the result can be disturbing, as in this case, where the building looks more like some sort of hell embassy.It wouldn’t be strange, though: doesn’t the Pope live on the other side of the Tevere River?
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From Waltham to Boston
‘From Waltham to Boston’, an offshoot of a bigger project on documenting Boston’s pulse, is now available on Amazon as a Kindle e-book.
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Open Interior
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Nature gets its space back…
I was drawn to the silent battle playing out on this façade. The building, once proud in its classical symmetry, has yielded to time and decay. Nature, opportunistic and patient, is reclaiming space—creeping across brick and stone, entwining itself with Corinthian capitals and shattered sills. This isn’t ruin porn; it’s a quiet negotiation between permanence and ephemerality. I shot straight on, flattening perspective to emphasise the structure’s geometry. Vertical lines matter here—the columns, the window frames, the pattern of the vines—all reinforcing the sense of a former order. Exposure was metered to protect detail in the shadows, especially behind the broken windows, while still holding colour in the overgrown foliage.…
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Renovating Milan
Milan, November 2017. A construction site—not the kind that demands attention, but the quiet kind that hides behind fabric and scaffolding. I took this photo walking past it for the third or fourth time. What stopped me wasn’t the building itself, but its ghost. Behind the mesh screen, the silhouette of the old façade still lingered, like a memory bleeding through fabric. Chimneys, outlines, the suggestion of windows. The city behind the curtain. At the bottom, the standard construction notice: printed bureaucracy stapled to metal, a reminder that change is always sanctioned, scheduled, structured. But the rest of the image resists clarity. Straight lines waver, verticals drift. Even the fence…
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The Financial Times at Night
Photographing office buildings after dark often reveals more than the day ever will. In this frame, the Financial Times offices stand illuminated against the void of a London night, each lit rectangle a stage, each desk a silent prop. The bright interiors are clean and geometric, their fluorescent light pouring through the grid of windows, set into the modernist rhythm of the façade. The composition is precise, aligned so the vertical and horizontal lines of the structure carry the weight of the frame. A slight foreground intrusion — the blurred metal fence — reminds the viewer that the vantage point is from the street, outside looking in. This physical separation…
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Justice Under Construction
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Guest Are Welcome!
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A Lamppost
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Life Within the Post Office
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Faces in the Façade: A Ghostly Smile in Stone
The camera tilts upward, catching the weathered skin of a building where plaster peels like old parchment. Two circles and an arch, carved decades ago, sit quietly above the passageway. Yet in this photograph, the mind cannot help but play: the decoration forms a round-eyed, wide-mouthed face, its features soft and slightly comic. The resemblance is uncanny—here is the echo of the Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters, peering down with an oblivious grin. The cracked and flaking surface becomes its aging skin, the faded stucco a reminder that even ghosts of pop culture can find new haunts in architecture. Light and shadow turn structural detail into character. The deep arch below reads…
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The Oslo Opera House
I’ve always believed that architecture reveals a different truth when seen from the water. Shooting the Oslo Opera House from the sea reinforced that idea for me. From this vantage point, the building doesn’t just sit on the waterfront—it seems to grow out of it, its sloping planes echoing the movement of the harbour while anchoring themselves firmly into the city skyline. For this photograph, I chose a framing that allowed the Opera House to dominate without isolating it. The surrounding water occupies enough of the lower frame to set the context, while the upper section leaves room for the building to breathe against the sky. This separation of planes—sea,…
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The Lost Hotel
I photographed this derelict façade in an Italian town on a walk that started with no intention and ended with this frame. “Albergo Aterno,” barely legible beneath a coat of turquoise decay, is what’s left of a forgotten hotel. I didn’t need to know its history to feel the abandonment radiating from every peeled layer of plaster. The frame is pulled tight—the architecture becomes a subject in itself, the wires and conduit lines accidentally composing a crude symmetry that holds the chaos together. This isn’t a pretty picture, and that’s the point. The scene punishes clean aesthetics. Harsh light from the afternoon sun exacerbates the texture—flaking walls, rusted metal, and…
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Mind The Gap!
I made this photograph standing almost flush with the wall, pointing the lens straight up into the thin slice of sky framed by stone and metal. The subject is not the building itself but the uneasy conversation between its decaying ornamentation and the open void above. The fractured balcony edges lean toward each other without touching, creating a tension in the composition that pulls the viewer’s eye toward the bright gap. From a compositional standpoint, the choice of perspective is both a strength and a limitation. The severe upward angle forces strong converging lines, which add a sense of depth and slight unease. However, the proximity of the elements means…
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A Zeppelin in The New York Sky
New York, 2000. I remember looking up from the crowded streets and seeing it — a zeppelin, drifting slowly above the jagged canyon of Midtown’s architecture. In that moment, it felt like something out of a different century had quietly slipped into ours. I didn’t have much time to think; I just framed, focused, and released the shutter. The composition is as much about absence as it is about presence. The airship is small, almost swallowed by the negative space of the sky, yet the buildings act as monumental bookends, forcing the eye toward the centre. The turquoise cast of the glass facade on the left and the warm brick…
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Inside the Elevator
Escher’s Relativity inspired these shots.
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An Unplausable Perspective
There is something odd in this photo, isnt’it?
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Hanging Clothes Waiting to Dry
I made this photograph on a terrace overlooking the valley, where the most ordinary of domestic acts — laundry drying in the sun — becomes unexpectedly theatrical. The line of garments stretches across the frame, their irregular shapes and colours set against the vast blue expanse of the background. The rural landscape below, softened by distance and haze, contrasts with the immediacy of cotton, wool, and synthetic fabric caught in the breeze. From a technical standpoint, the image is driven by colour and contrast. The saturation is high, which intensifies the reds, purples, and greens of the clothing and the terracotta of the terrace. Against the cool, almost painterly tones…
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The Abused Balcony
The irony here was too sharp to ignore. A fascist-era building , clad in travertine and brick, declares in Latin: Ave, dulce vatis flumen — Ave, vetus orbis nomen. “Hail, sweet river of the poet — Hail, ancient name of the world.” Above, the symbols of empire; below, a tangle of satellite dishes, like mechanical flowers craning toward the global signal. The architecture aims for eternity, the technology changes with every billing cycle. I framed this head-on, symmetry unbroken, letting the building’s own monumentality dictate the geometry. The composition rests on that tension — history and broadcast, stone and plastic, rhetoric and reception. The Latin inscription begs for permanence. The…
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Inside a Lost Building
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A Portrait on the Nasdaq Building
I took this photograph in the year 2000, standing in front of the Nasdaq building and staring at a giant portrait of a man whose name I never learned. The caption read “July 1985” — perhaps the date of his death — and the grainy, blown-up image suggested an older video still. In the upper-left of the portrait, there were shelves lined with what looked like vinyl records. That detail nudged me toward thinking he might have been a musician or someone who worked in the recording industry. But it’s speculation. What I could say with certainty was that his expression stopped me in my tracks. There was a strange…
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Late Afternoon Workers
At Place de la Monnaie, in Bruxelles, late-afternoon workers look their life go by, while the rest of the world, enjoy the fun. This photo felt less like a building and more like a roll of exposed film. Fifteen windows, side by side. Fifteen little theatres. The framing is perfect—not by accident, but by architecture. A row of lives unfolding under fluorescent light. You can almost hear the hum. Some rooms are empty. Some are dim. In a few, people remain—cleaning up, wrapping gifts, turning off screens. There are Christmas trees, forgotten chairs, coats slung over partitions. And above all, stillness. Each window holds its own shot. Unrelated, disconnected. A…
