In Focus: fourteen places, one format

The largest single series in Melanie Viola’s catalogue is also the most consistent. In focus is fourteen photographs, and every one follows the same layout: a black-and-white picture, upright, on a pale grey mount, with the city’s name in capitals below it and the exact spot in handwriting under that.

The places

Four are in New York: the Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge, the Statue of Liberty and Times Square. Paris appears twice, with the Eiffel Tower and Notre-Dame. The rest are one picture each: Amsterdam’s Prinsengracht, Berlin’s Television Tower with Museum Island, Boston’s North End and waterfront, the Chicago Riverwalk, Westminster in London, Sunset Cliffs in San Diego, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Grand Canal in Venice with St Mark’s Campanile.

Berlin is where she is based, and the Berlin picture is the least expected of the set. The Television Tower is small and off to one side; most of the frame is taken up by the white columns of a building in the foreground.

Lines first

Her biography says she is “drawn to urban landscape and the lines she finds in architecture”, and that horizontal structures crossed by vertical ones “provide a rapid dynamism”. The series shows what that means in practice. The Brooklyn Bridge is photographed straight down the walkway, so the suspension cables fan out from the centre of the picture. The Eiffel Tower is taken from below and tilted, which turns the ironwork into a diagonal. Westminster puts a double-decker bus under the clock tower, one vertical against one horizontal.

Not every picture is architecture. Venice is a row of moored gondolas with the campanile behind them, and Sunset Cliffs is rock and palm trees with no building in sight.

Hanging them

Because the format never changes, the pictures sit together easily. Two or three from the same city make a set, and so do single pictures from different cities. All fourteen are available framed or as a print on its own, in several sizes.