Earth, Water and Air
Arguably the core building blocks for life. When I originally set out to try to record my vision for these basic elements, it didn’t take me long to soon realise that there are, like life, many distractions which come about unexpectedly to alter your view of what is in front of you and where you really find yourself.
I attempt to strip back what you can see and limit your view to the key fundamentals of these elements – free of interference that inevitably carries our minds wandering toward another crossroads. Light and dark also have strong connections in many aspects of or lives – but here I want to leave these open to you. Darkness to many can be a forbidding and intimidating place, but it can also be a calming sedative. A simple place free of complication.
It really depends on our own inflection.
Equally the air we need to continue on our journey, the fragility of such an intangible life-source – like light – that can dissipate on a whim. Yet the sounds of life leaving will always echo forever.
Concrete Cubism
The simplicity of shape and form is always more complicated than we initially give credit to. The many conditions that are required to be in place to help reveal one aspect are so fleeting that in the next moment they expose something else. The subtlety of movement may be so minute, yet the repercussions so immense.
Concrete architecture of the past – the aptly named brutalist – stemming from a rawness, serves as a solidifying ballast to many remaining structures. Their geometric shape and form appears to anchor with visual weight, but it is easy to forget the seemingly inconsequential and intangible elements that link this heaviness to help reveal a far more complex being.
Art Deco Miami
Art Deco architecture has become synonymous with Miami Beach. These images have been taken in a considered way, removing unnecessary and distracting contextual elements and focusing on the uniqueness of architecture to ensure that they retain their timeless quality – reflecting back to the wonder of the architecture when it was constructed in the 1930s. This helps showcase the the fine art imagery of the buildings that makes them so inimitable, both stylistically and architecturally. What makes them so distinctive to Miami Beach and so important to the Art Deco movement.
Antony Zacharias is a fine art photographer specializing in striking images of modernist architecture.. He has also completed a series of low-key black and white images emphasizing the contrasting earth, water and clouds in the landscape with his ‘earth + air’ and ‘water + air’ projects.
Antony is also an author, tutor and speaker. He is known for his books on photography including the seminal text on long exposure photography published by National Geographic and Ammonite Press and other texts covering various aspects of photography.
Antony has won numerous awards for his photography and has recently been named a finalist in the Hasselblad Masters 2021 Competition.