ART

For Brent Townshend, photography is about seeing the world. His goal is to also let us see what is often missed. And one direction we invariably forget to see is up. In the mid-1980s, photographer Brent Townshend explored landscape and night photography before developing an interest in street photography. In 2004, he moved to Paris, where he actively pursued photojournalism, fashion, and studio photography. Townshend's foray into these different forms of photography enlarged his creative expression, honed his skills and talents, and focused his artistic vision toward the realm of fine-art photography.

Townshend aims his camera toward the sky or ceiling. The resulting shapes, created by the sky when framed by buildings, captivate him. Indoors, he captures the images painted on the ceilings of well-known architectural structures like Grand Central Station in New York City, the Paris Archives, and the Opera Garnier, both in France. Many of these shapes, paintings, or designs are ignored because individuals seldom look up and take notice.

Townshend relishes the technical challenges in creating his images. For Looking Up, he developed a process to capture extreme wide-angle images with high contrast using a full-frame, fisheye lens, a wide-angle lens that creates a uniquely distorted hemispherical image. He merges these images into high-resolution, seamless photographs. Through this process, new forms appear—forms that existed in reality but could not be seen in the same way with the unaided human eye. Changes in the projections, angles, and other parameters cause the forms to shift, the lines to warp, and the eyes to be guided elsewhere.

Brent Townshend is a fine art photographer based in Paris and San Francisco.