Geometric Compositions: On the Photography of Ashini Nanayakkara

Sri Lankan photographer Ashini Nanayakkara’s works explore the links between architecture and photography. While travelling in Tasmania in 2017, she encountered miles of vast and desolate architecture, inspiring her to photograph urban landscapes. Over the years, she honed her focus on buildings, their design and the context of the urban spaces they belong in, as she continued photographing, exploring and researching the twenty-first-century urban landscape while studying for her MFA in Melbourne.

Her more recent work imaginatively investigates urban architecture through photographic realism. While her works have minimal human presence, a sense of inhabitation and citizenship can be sensed through the landscapes of light, patterns, geometrics and colours in the images. Through unconventional yet fascinating ways of looking at various elements of the built environment, her photographs bring the city to life as a compound structure. Most importantly, Nanayakkara’s photography captures the history and identity of a city at a particular time through its context. Her photographs of Melbourne, for example, depict the wide variety of urban architectural styles that the city has acquired over the years since the early years of European settlement. The Victorian-style skyscraper, built during the late 1800s and the early 1900s, was a result of the economic development that occurred after the Civil War in the United States, and was embraced by architects in Melbourne shortly after. A century or so later, Nanayakkara captures the fascinating mix of the Victorian and the modern skyscrapers in the Melbourne skyline, as the latter was popularised in the 1960s following the drop in construction in the city during the Second World War. The photographer does this by highlighting the complex geometrics, shapes and spatial configurations that give character to the city’s urban landscape.

In terms of process, Nanayakkara often plays with perspective: pointing her lens in unconventional ways, using a long lens to focus on very specific areas of the architecture to emphasise context, or using multiple exposures to create layers and different ways of seeing in a single frame. Nanayakkara also manipulates the images digitally to further enhance the uniqueness of the architectural specimens that she encounters with her camera.

All images by Ashini Nanayakkara. Images courtesy of the artist.

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