This is Not Architecture

Zinc Slash Tree: From this is not architecture

At Helsinki's Kiasma art gallery until 24th April is an exhibition of Finnish photographer Ola Kolemainen's abstracted pictures of buildings, entitled 'A Building is Not A Building' - perhaps in a nod to the surrealist Magritte's famous 'The Treachery of Images' caption 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe'. Then again the title is also literally true as, in the case of his carefully cropped and oversized works, none of the pictures are really of the buildings featured as such but of effects encountered when looking at them.

Now as you may know by now this is just my sort of thing - combining architecture with finding details and patterns from architecture and nature with my camera - so when I found out there was a photograph competition (sponsored by Nokia's Ovi picture sharing service) to get a tour of the exhibition with the photographer I thought 'why not?' (or to be exact Konna said 'you should enter that') and picked out a few of my old pics, cropped them as needed to give them a more abstracted look, and - voila!

      

red arcs, grooves, jupiter, light wave, finlandia - but can anyone identify the six buildings featured on this page?

There were apparently about 100 entrants, so I was quite pleased to hear today I was selected as one of the winners... although it's not clear which of my pictures I was selected for - I think 'red arcs' is most like his work, although 'zinc slash tree' is my favourite. I'll give the architects in the room a few days to work out which buildings (some quite famous) are featured.

I think that is probably the first thing I have won since getting second place in the javelin competition on a school sports day many moons ago so this is quite a novelty.  I just hope that it's not all explained in Finnish! (And wouldn't it be nice if it turned out there was a Nokia goodie bag...)