Sky Scraper Magic by Steve Geer ARPS

INTERNATIONAL MEMBERS SKY SCRAPER MAGIC

STEVE GEER ARPS

Ilive in Chicago, a city known for its skyscrapers. Of the forty tallest buildings in the city, half have been constructed since the year 2000. These impressive twenty-first century structures have mirror-like skins of glass. Those of us that have played with two or more mirrors know that certain arrangements can produce an optical illusion. The same is true of shiny skyscrapers which are often built in clusters. In certain spots, if you look up you might see reality remodeled into unlikely, if not impossible, geometries. In addition to creating mirrormagic, these tall reflective towers also redirect daylight into the city’s shadows, and sometimes this redirected light itself seems magical. This is skyscraper magic: the magic of large-scale mirrors and soft reflected light.

American photographer Duane Michals once said: “Photographers tend not to photograph what they can’t see, which is the very reason one should try to attempt it.”

Attempting to capture skyscraper magic in a photograph – that magical feeling created by reflected light and optical illusion, not the skyscrapers themselves – seemed like a worthy challenge and, starting at the end of 2018, it became my winter project.

There are some special spots in the city where skyscraper magic can be really appreciated. They are places where two walls of steel and glass meet to form an alcove on the outside of a tall building. If you stand within the compass of the alcove and look straight up, in the resulting worms-eye view nearby skyscrapers sometimes appear like shards in a giant kaleidoscope. Sometimes they are like stems in a kelp forest in which the geometry of nature has been replaced with the geometry of Euclid. In my quest to capture the magic, I searched for these places. In particular,

I searched for glass alcoves in which the worms-eye geometry was striking and immersive, and the filtered and reflected light brought this geometry to life.

According to Edgar Degas: “Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.”

I have chosen to convert my digital images to black and white since I find this best emphasizes the drama and mystery of light piecing the shadows, and it’s this drama and mystery that is, I think, at the heart of the magic. In the digital darkroom I have also made some modest clean-up to remove small spots that are sometimes on the window glass and which I found distracting on large-scale prints. Finally, I make local adjustments to light curves where needed. Apart from these limited changes, the images are straight photographs.

Chicago is not the only modern city offering skyscraper magic. In the summer of 2019, I visited London and discovered plenty of magic amongst the city’s tallest buildings. As a nod to London’s impressive architecture, I have included one of these images in the series. Skyscraper construction in both London and Chicago seems to be thriving, so every year there will be new locations and new possibilities to explore.

Credits: Steve Geer ARPS