- A gray cat slinks past a wooden house. There’s something a little intimidating attempting to describe.
Today I decided to start a new black-and-white photography project, which will culminate in the creation of a book. The project will explore a specific theme or combine various constituent elements of ancient and ruined architecture.
The project’s name – Negative Spaces, for example – carries a conceptual justification that is intended to be twofold. On one hand, it is a direct reference to the language of analogue photography: the negative is the matrix of the photographic image, the space where light becomes shadow and where black-and-white photography finds its purest expression. On the other hand, the term evokes the notion of negative space — the emptiness that defines and gives shape to what surrounds it.
In practice, this double meaning reflects exactly what I intend to photograph: buildings, palaces, mills, and pre-industrial and industrial-era structures that often retain intact façades, while their interiors lie entirely or partially empty. Behind these façades we find vacant spaces of various dimensions and scales – emptiness itself has become the very content of the image. Hence the choice of the name Negative Spaces: a title that unites the photographic medium (the negative, monochrome) with the subject matter (emptiness, absence, what remains when function disappears and only form is left).
