Moooonday Mailbag!
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Hi Rachel,
My name is Philippe and I work with the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal, Canada.
I think you’ll be interested by the latest photographic installation at the CCA: a 66-foot long digital print by Canadian photographer Robert Burley.
The subject of the installation is a digitally processed image of a polaroid print that shows the implosion of Kodak film processing plant in France. To me this symbolizes the impact that digital photography has had on architecture, since it led to the destruction of many film processing plants around the world.
Full details can be found here.
Hope you enjoy this!
Philippe Andraos
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I sure did enjoy this, thanks Philippe!
Thank you Rachel and Philippe for spreading this. I will be sure to have a look on my next trip to Montreal.
“Bob” Burley was one of the first photogs I assisted back in toronto in the 90′s. He was shooting architecture, he learned with Hedrich Blessing in Chicago. Bob is great. We would meet early before jobs at a diner on Carlaw street in T.O. that had these little booths for what people used to be sized as in the 40′s, and have bacon and eggs and homefries and then go out and shoot buildings. He let me set up the camera. Which was a lot considering what I didn’t know. Eventually I moved up to loading sheet film.
We had one job to shoot a new skyscraper in downtown Toronto so he scouted it and determined that the idea location was the rooftop of the nearby 40 story office tower. … so up we go and we are on the roof, and Bob sticks the tripod about a foot from the edge of the building and has me tie it off with this huge rope to the rails for the widow washer crane. Then he gets under the cloth for what must have been a 90mm upside down vertigo event.
We also did midnight office interiors where I was tasked with gelling all the fluorescents and taking the personal shit off the desks and cubicles and sweeping the carpet nap all in the same direction. At 3am with no AC. You get a little foggy.
He said he never could square how people made money shooting architecture because you had to wait around for light and weather and you could not bill as many days as it took.
Bob also did a great book about the Olmstead parks, with Lee Friedlander and Geoffrey James for CCA.
I haven’t stayed in touch with him but I remember him as someone who gave me a chance when I was less useful than a rubber doorstop.
[...] Photographer Robert Burley has created an amazing 66′x18′ photo piece that is currently on display on the facade of the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal, Canada. [via] [...]