Featured Finalist: Kris Baum
Subterrania
‘Stockholm Metro’ from Kris Baum’s Subterrania took out the People’s Choice Award for the 2013 Head Off Landscape Prize. See the full gallery of Head off Finalists here.
Subterrania is an ongoing photography project about the unassuming beauty that can be found in metro stations and subways around the world, devoid of people. The absence of people within each piece of work enables the viewer to appreciate the structures and finer details of each space as well creating an uneasy, eerie atmosphere within the orderly symmetry.
I enjoy photographing large, grand spaces that have a certain order in the array of lines, colours and curves. I also find symmetry the most natural or harmonious photographic composition and this is why it features prominently in my Subterrania work.
The images have metaphors and shapes implied by their compositions. ‘Embankment #1’, for example, feels like the inside of a snake, ‘Tottenham Court Road’ I liken to a pinball machine, ‘Hyde Park Corner’ looks like an insect’s head, ‘Barcelona #1’ reminds me of H.R. Giger’s spacecraft in the movie ‘Alien’. These are my own interpretations, and I invite other people to interpret the images how they see them.
London, Stockholm, Munich, Budapest, Prague, Copenhagen, St Petersburg, Moscow and Barcelona are the cities currently in the Subterrania collection.
Each city’s architectural style and design add a unique point of difference to the project and I will continue Subterrania by exploring Asia and North America.
Website: http://www.krisbaum.com/
