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As a photographer, I like to find viewing angles that illustrate how the sculptures interact with the cities that surround them. Some don’t fit in at all, at least from a photo composition viewpoint. But others integrate so perfectly that it’s difficult to imagine the location without the sculpture. Those are the … Continue reading
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Visitors silhouetted against the flames of a video billboard atop the ruby red steps in Times Square, New York City.
"Cupid's Span" sculpture on the Embarcadero in San Francisco, with city in background.
The Cloud Gate, on Chicago's AT&T Plaza in Millennium Park, is a 110-ton elliptical sculpture forged from a seamless series of highly polished stainless steel plates that reflect the city's skyline.
Cubed Curve sculpture and buildings, Sixth Avenue and W 50th St., New York City.
Vessel is a 150-foot-high art structure of connected staircases between the buildings of Hudson Yards in New York City.
Promenade, a bronze sculpture by Ann Weber, stands in Skyline Park in downtown Denver. The artist intended the sculpture to represent two people on a walk.
LOVE Park statue and fountain in LOVE Park (officially named John F. Kennedy Plaza), Philadelphia.
The eyes on a face projected on a tower of Chicago's Crown Fountain peers over the treetops when viewed from AT&T Plaza in Millennium Park.
Excalibur, a steel sculpture by Beverly Stoll Pepper, stands outside the Edward J. Schwartz Federal Building in San Diego.
Unconditional Surrender, a sculpture by Seward Johnson, is surrounded by tourists in Tuna Harbor Park beside San Diego Bay in San Diego.
A couple walks down stairs beneath the Group of Four Trees, a sculpture by French sculpture Jean Dubuffet, in the Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza, New York City.
Windows of the office tower at 140 Broadway can be seen through the hole in Isamu Noguchi's Cube, a giant red-orange cube standing on its corner.
The unisphere stands behind a landscaped area on the site of the 1963-64 New York World's Fair in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, New York.
The Arthur Ashe statue stands outside Arthur Ashe Stadium at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens, New York City.
A fancy robot lady mural by Italian street artist Pixel Pancho on a building at 10th Avenue and W. 22nd Street can be seen from The High Line, New York City.
ones that are fun to photograph.
My three favorite public sculptures to photograph — and three that blend well with their surroundings — are Cubed Curve in New York, Cloud Gate in Chicago and Cupid’s Span in San Francisco.
Until recently, Cubed Curve sat outside the Time-Life Building on the corner of Sixth Avenue and West 50th Street in New York City. The sculpture, by New York-born artist William Crovello, was commissioned by the Association for a Better New York and installed in 1972.
The blue metal Curbed Curve is appropriately named. It’s a giant curve (think of the horseshoe-shaped magnets we had as kids) that has had its “legs” bent into additional curves so the entire object forms a cube.
The sculpture looks different from various positions around the cube and the flow of curves in the sculpture provides interesting angles to photograph. Add the tall buildings that surround it (the Time-Life Building beside the sculpture, the McGraw-Hill Building and News Corporation Building in the next block to the south, Radio City Music Hall across Sixth Avenue) and a blue sky above and a photographer is presented with almost unlimited compositional opportunities.
But Cubed Curve is now gone from New York City. The Rockefeller Group, owner of the Time-Life Building, moved it from the corner. It now resides outside the Berman Museum on the campus of Ursinus College in Pennsylvania. It looks somewhat lonely, sitting in an open space with trees in the background.
The Cloud Gate sculpture, installed in 2006 on Chicago’s AT&T Plaza in Millennium Park, is a 110-ton elliptical sculpture forged from a seamless series of highly polished stainless steel plates. The sculpture, often referred to as “The Bean” by many locals because of its been-like shape, is by British artist Anish Kapoor.
The curving sculpture reflects the city’s skyline and, in a way, becomes part of the skyline. Like the Cubed Curve, photographing Cloud Gate from different angles provides different results, so the number of potential compositions is great.
An issue when photographing a reflective sculpture like Cloud Gate is avoiding having the photographer prominent in the reflection.
How did I stay out of my photos? I didn’t. If you could zoom in on an area near the center of the sculpture you’d see me standing there with the camera in front of my face.
Cupid’s Span is a giant sculpture by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Brugge. It’s one of a number of sculptures along the Embarcadero in San Francisco. The 60-foot-high sculpture represents a bow and arrow shooting down into a small pedestrian park.
When viewed from one side the San Francisco skyline is in the background. When viewed from the other side, the Bay Bridge is in the background. And the colors really pop when viewed on a clear day against a blue sky.
The sculpture, installed in November 2002, is bizarre in a “I wonder why they did that?” way. So I looked it up
According to a statement from the artists on their web site:
"Inspired by San Francisco's reputation as the home port of Eros, we began our project for a small park on the Embarcadero along San Francisco Bay by trying out the subject of Cupid's stereotypical bow and arrow. The first sketches were made of the subject with the bowstring drawn back, poised on the feathers of the arrow, which pointed up to the sky.
"When Coosje van Bruggen found this position too stiff and literal, she suggested turning the image upside down: the arrow and the central part of the bow could be buried in the ground, and the tail feathers, usually downplayed, would be the focus of attention. That way the image became metamorphic, looking like both a ship and a tightened version of a suspension bridge, which seemed to us the perfect accompaniment to the site. In addition, the object functioned as a frame for the highly scenic situation, enclosing — depending on where one stood — either the massed buildings of the city's downtown or the wide vista over the water and the Bay Bridge toward the distant mountains.
"As a counterpoint to romantic nostalgia, we evoked the mythological account of Eros shooting his arrow into the earth to make it fertile. The sculpture was placed on a hill, where one could imagine the arrow being sunk under the surface of plants and prairie grasses. By slanting the bow's position, Coosje added a sense of acceleration to the Cupid's Span. Seen from its ‘stern,’ the bow-as-boat seems to be tacking on its course toward the white tower of the city’s Ferry Building.”
There are many more photos of public art in my collection. And when I’m walking the streets of various cities I’m always looking for public art to photograph. The art itself is always interesting, but capturing photos to show how the art integrates with its surroundings is a fun photography challenge.
But Cubed Curve is now gone from New York City. The Rockefeller Group, owner of the Time-Life Building, moved it from the corner. It now resides outside the Berman Museum on the campus of Ursinus College in Pennsylvania. It looks somewhat lonely, sitting in an open space with trees in the background.
