Victor Enrich

Why I chose Victor:
When researching architectural photographers, I noticed one which stuck out to me as being different from the rest. The reason I chose Victor to explore in more depth is because he doesn't just take simple photographs of building. Instead, he transforms the buildings and turns them into complex surrealist images. He does this through taking different parts of the images and then making them unrealistic and more interesting. 

Bio

Born in Barcelona, in 1976. When I was a kid I was spending most of the time playing at home, making races with my scale model cars. Those races were all over the house, including my bedroom, the corridor or the sitting room. With the years I found out that this was my first step into understanding the space from a different perspective, not as a simple user but maybe as a designer. When I was around 8 I discovered technical drawing, thanks to my grandfather, who worked all his life in construction. So, I got rid of my scale cars and I moved into scale plans. First of all, I was playing with some bizarre housing designs, but with time I started to design cities. As time went by, I discovered perspective, as a two dimensional technique to represent three dimensional scenarios. Totally gone crazy with this, I started to make perspective drawings of “my” cities.

In this image, Victor takes the building and transforms it in order for him to create a three dimensional scenario. The level of depth and detail in the bottom inspires me to create images with the same level of detail. It is clear from this image the amount of time Victor puts into his work. I also like the positioning of the building now, where it is is curved and the top of the building is in a completely different position. In many of his images he uses the same buildings, which he recreates in this image is the object of a boat. 

This image presents a modern feeling to me as the three skyscrapers in the image have been transformed to show the insides of them. I like the different shapes that the three buildings now make and the angles that they are leaning towards. The composition for the image is key as there is not a lot of wasted space, however enough to show the scale of the buildings in comparison to the surroundings. 

This image stands out for me from the others as what he usually does is take an image and transform it to make it appear 3D. In this image, he takes parts away from the image in order for it to have that affect, and instead makes the building resemble a block of cheese. There is a strong use of colour in the image, the orange of the holes stand out as they contrast to the dark grey backdrop of the building. In much of his other work, the formal element of colour is lacked however I feel that this image shows that it should be included as much as it can.

This image is extremely creative as he takes the stairs from the hotel and adapts it to appear they are going off into the screen. The composition of the image enables the audience to question where the stairs are leading too. This image is one of my favourite from Victor Enrich due to its simplistic nature and calm feeling it emits. The way he has taken the staircase and just made it trail off into the distance stands out to me. 

Influences

Looking at Victor Enrich's work inspired me to look at the different ways that you can distort buildings and architecture. When I started looking at the Evidence topic, I looked at different skyscrapers and architecture and in my computer experiments I did subtle edits to buildings to make them look different. When looking at his work, I took this image of The 'Walkie Talkie' in London, and distorted it by selecting it in photoshop and changing the shape. I did not want to distort the entire image as I didn't want the sky to look different and it to be noticeable that I have simply applied a filter to the image. Instead, I took the parts of the image that I want to distort out and distorted it then placing it back on the blue sky.

Summary

Overall, when I chose Victor Enrich to explore in further detail, it inspired me to do more with my images of architecture and buildings. Now, when looking at the different buildings I have, I am able to look back at the work of Enrich and try and distort it and make it similar to his.