City On A Hill, 2022 | David Burdeny
“For the past 15 years I’ve increasingly moved away from landscape work, to photographing cities, architecture and built environments along nature’s periphery. City On a Hill is an evolution of that process.
After years of working with conventional perspective as a way to represent space, I was interested in an alternative method that was more sympathetic to the unexpected ways in which people adapted to and reconfigured these unique environments. Photographed in Italy and Morocco, they were captured with a medium format digital camera fitted with a super telephoto lens. The resultant image compresses the city’s depth into a two dimensional surface revealing the interconnectedness between its structures and the invisible actors that generated it.
There is evidence of humanity in some of the frames while others are empty – people, laundry and the occasional car hint at the internal logic of what appears to be random. However, what the participant misses when moving through these spaces, and what I sought to reveal in these images, is how the towns developed over time with purpose. Each developed organically, built up of cells over time into a larger more complex whole.” – David Burdeny, 2023