As my blog develops I am also going to look at photographers work that I personally think is similar, feels the same or think may have been influenced by artists.
I have chosen to look at Georgia O’Keeffe’s ‘Radiator Building’ in relation to one of Brassai’s New York city night landscapes.
O’Keeffe spent much of her early career in New York and her ‘Radiator Building’ from 1927 shows a dramatic New York city skyscraper lit up at night. The angularity of the building and the windows, along with the two streams of light from behind the building is what I immediately saw in Brassai’s work.
We have a dark and foreboding central feature that dominates Brassai’s 1957 Night scene, 30 years after O’Keeffe. We see a wider view of the city not just one building. We see the city alive with traffic and lights from windows. Like O’Keeffe there are two streams of light however they are not together nor are they coming from behind a building. Instead I see them as the two roads leading us into the picture. Like the painting there is strong angularity with both the subject and the framing.
The colours of the image are reminisant to Georgia O’Keeffe’s work. Reds, yellows, blues and whites. The blurred lights in both fire our imagination as to what is was like to be in such an alive cityscape.
How Art inspires Photography 