Capturing the spatial geometry of her Cubist-inspired studio work led architect-turned-photographer Kirsta Jahnke to abstracted close-ups – drones give her the chance to employ this approach to capture entire landscapes
Canadian photographer Krista Jahnke concedes that, while studying architecture at Ottowa’s Carlton University, architecture was never the primary inspiration for her studio work. Instead she found herself drawn to art, particularly the cubism of Picasso and Braque; their compositions intimating their own form of spatial geometry. She says she felt her studio work too was more about physical modelling than drawing. Photography was initially a means of representing her models in two dimensions; but it became increasingly abstract; forensically close up, read as baroque layers or in soft focus, the images became an end in themselves; the subject rendered incidental.
What happens when the world is your model? Jahnke tells me that she never travels without her camera drone; here, while accompanying some architect friends on a trip around Italy. The prelude to this image had been a slow, winding drive up the opposite side of this valley near Carrara. On the way they passed dusty ramshackle workers’ villages, populated by those whose job was cleaving the stone from the hillsides. They were rudely photogenic; Jahnke regrets not having stopped to capture them on film.
The drone takes in the view in a way that Jahnke, even from her final vantage point, could never have done; and from there, the abstraction she’d once sought at the micro scale is replicated at the macro. Nature assaulted by humans for more than 20 centuries, this ancient, now fractal, landscape assumes the qualities of the best contemporary art – timeless, though modern.