Colin Winterbottom

Colin Winterbottom has built a career largely on studies of Washington’s urban landscape. His photos seek to express not just what a place looks like but how it feels to be there. Colin Winterbottom combines a heightened sensitivity to place with compelling compositions and unique perspectives to infuse the urban landscape with drama and mood. His Cathedral series builds on a recognized portfolio of D.C. photographs that embrace the grand and the gritty with equal enthusiasm. He will continue to photograph at the Cathedral as restoration work continues.

For over twenty years I have made photographs of the urban landscape, with a focused interest in making images that reveal not just what a particular architectural subject looks like, but the emotional impact it has on the viewer. I seek to capture on film a sense of how our eyes and mind perceive structures and spaces, their sweep, essence and energy. Yet while most of my subjects are buildings, I cannot really call myself an architectural photographer. The formal field of architectural photography seems largely shackled by constraints aimed at making images with strict accuracy: all straight lines must remain straight, everything on level, no leans, no distortions. This aesthetic of technical accuracy may convey an architect’s precision, but, in my opinion, too often does so at the expense of capturing atmosphere and the impact the whole may have on the viewer.

As a fine art photographer, I value expression over accuracy and, as such, embrace distortions that help convey the sensory dynamics of our built environment. When we walk into a compelling architectural space – be it an iconic monument, an ornamental cathedral, or a crumbling factory – we do not address it looking squarely straight ahead, with our eyes level, turning slowly so that we may consider each wall from a perpendicular perspective. Rather we throw our head back so we can look up, we shift it at angles to study the structure over us… around us… at our feet. As we do so, our eyes are seeing lines askew and elements at odd-angles. Neurologists tell us our brain works to process all of this: it levels the odd angles, straightens the lines and stitches together some singular sense of the whole to consider above, below, behind, left and right all at once. In many of my photos, I seek to represent that infinitesimal break between seeing and perceiving—the raw data before the corrections fall in.

Swing-lens panoramic film cameras have become an important tool in my strategy for achieving that goal. The photographs selected for this exhibit all use these specialized cameras, which have lenses that sweep from left to right across the horizon to capture 140 degrees – closely matching our central field of vision. Several of the images (e.g., the water filtration plant and the National Cathedral) resulted from two or more exposures “seamed” together to show a full 360-degree sweep. The study of the Cathedral ceiling – which suggests an arc along its straight centerline—is an example of a distortion that reveals a sense of this broad expanse. Conversely several other photos here (e.g., the vertical Washington Monument study) are created by moving the camera itself as the lens is making its rotation, using distortion simply for an odd, more playful effect.