Finding Geometry in the City
Geometry isn't designed into the city — it was always there. The photographer's job is to train themselves to see it.
The city is a textbook of geometry. Most people just never learn to read it.
I started photographing urban geometry on an ordinary weekday morning. I arrived at the station earlier than usual, stood on the platform waiting for my train, and glanced up at the ceiling — a few intersecting beams, a row of evenly spaced fluorescent tubes, a reflective glass wall that duplicated the entire space once more. I raised my camera, pressed the shutter, and then realized: I had been walking through this place all along, but had never truly seen it.
What Is Urban Geometry?
Urban geometry isn't the kind of geometry you find on an architect's blueprint. It's a visual system of shapes that emerges accidentally from the collision of everyday function and physical structure.
A few common sources:
- Ground markings: Yellow parking lines, white crosswalks, red restricted zones — these symbols function as commands, but visually they are compositional elements
- Repeating units on building facades: Window grids, louvers, tile joints, steel connection nodes
- Reflective surfaces: A glass curtain wall folds another building into itself, creating a symmetry that doesn't exist in reality
- Light and shadow edges: The hard shadow cast by strong sidelight onto a wall is cleaner than any geometric shape
How to Train Yourself to See Geometry?
Photography is not the art of waiting for perfect light. It is the ability to train your eyes to read what already exists.
A few methods that have worked for me:
1. Look First, Don't Reach for the Camera
When you arrive somewhere, keep your camera in your bag and walk for five minutes. Force yourself to just look. You'll start noticing shapes that are normally filtered out by your "function filter" — because you're no longer rushing to "get the shot," you're simply seeing.
2. Find Repetition
Geometry surfaces most easily in repetition. One window is not geometry; twenty windows in a row is. Find the repeating unit and try to fill the frame with it.
3. Flatten the Z-axis
Shooting straight-on is one of the most powerful techniques in urban geometry. When you stand directly in front of a subject with your lens parallel to its surface, depth disappears — everything becomes a relationship of shapes on a flat plane. The wall is no longer a wall; it's a picture.
4. Pay Attention to Negative Space
Half the power of a geometric composition comes from the empty space around it. The angle where sky cuts into a building, the proportion of empty ground — these areas of "nothing" determine the visual weight of the "something."
A Practical Exercise
Next time you're walking through the city, try this:
- Find a wall you consider "completely ordinary"
- Walk directly in front of it, keeping your lens parallel to the surface
- Find the strongest line on the wall — it might be a material edge, a crack, or a color change
- Let that line divide the frame into a proportion that feels "right" to you
- Press the shutter
You'll be surprised to find that "completely ordinary" walls don't exist.
Geometry has always been there — it's just waiting for you to stop and see it.