INTRODUCTION
In the 1980s I began exploring the urban environment that I encountered and lived with. It was what I did away from my professional work of photographing what I was asked to. With a youthful lack of foresight I didn’t have a conscious plan but looking back after a quarter century I realized that through photographing the built environment I had produced an autobiography of my life, that culminated in the chronological collection, ‘Building Character.’
Never visited for purely photographic reasons each photograph is the memory trigger that marks a specific time, place or event experienced with family or friends. These structures weren’t the homes I lived in but the urban landscape encountered around me as I made my way through life.
Photographing the urban landscape I subsumed the culture, experiencing and understanding place in a way that for me fostered belonging and roots. Photographing the built environment has been and continues to be a very personal journey as I intersect with current time experiences and the generations that inhabited these places before. The original visitors to a 12th century Norman church could not have imagined Midtown Manhattan but they are both my physical, historical and personal reality and equally are yours to share in, through my photographs. I find this crossing of style and time amazing to be a part of.
I am interested in not only architectural stylings but the working and reworking
of surfaces, from one generational hand to the next, the preservation, destruction
or alteration of the buildings that we live with but perhaps never take the
time to see.
We live our present surrounded by buildings that came before us, our interaction
with them shapes us adding a layer of distant history to our recent history
and present.
Tanya Ahmed
web site & blog
