Pop Art Meets Industrial Hamburg

I shot this industrial skyline in Hamburg, initially as a stark monochrome—smoke billowing against a winter sun, the city bathed in a haze of latent threat. But the image called for more. So I bent it, digitally, into a quartet: one frame fractured into four, each processed through a brutalist lens of colour theory—red, green, cyan, monochrome. A nod to Warhol, sure. But also to those old weather warnings on analogue TVs, when the signal bent reality and your retina paid the price.

Technically, the base image holds. The stack of buildings anchors the composition in rigid geometry—angular, postmodern, the kind of skyline that doesn’t beg for admiration but demands recognition. The smoke plume—thick, black, and balletic—divides the sky and gives the image narrative direction. Exposure balances well across the high-contrast spectrum, even in the colourised treatments. The sun bloom in the top frames deliberately overwhelms—an artistic push, not a mistake.

I’ve no interest in whether this qualifies as documentary or digital art. It’s a visual provocation, nothing more, nothing less. In four acts.