Urban Landscapes Reimagined – in Pictures

For Serbian photographer Nikola Olic, the built environment is a canvas for his inventive compositions. Using only a single camera and minimal Photoshopping, Olic creates abstract images that present the metropolis in a new light: “Instead of just taking a photograph, I move around a building and slightly change and adjust the composition,” he says.

“The object is manipulated by walking, zooming, checking sun angles, climbing garages…” Now based in Texas, Olic has focused largely on US cities, including New York, Chicago and Dallas, but he has also shot in Tokyo and Barcelona. Citing Michael Wolf, Oscar Niemeyer and Andreas Gursky as influences, he calls his work “structure photography”, explaining that it “offers a playful reimagining of what urban structures might represent”.

Traveling around United States helped feed the curiosity about city design,
urban development and architecture, how it shaped cities and our relationships with them. From that interest came the latest series of photographs, focusing onabstract representations of immovable large structures around us.

Nikola explains: “Every photograph in this collection comes with a story, a brief commentary about the structure being photographed, its name, and the location where it was taken. This in turn offers a quick return to the real world in which the structure exists, of cars, noise, buildings and people, and is intended as a demystifying tool, reminding us that these structures, beautiful or otherwise, are among us on every corner, in cities we visit or cities where we live. This photographic opportunity can be transformed permanently both into what we see in the structure, and whatever at that street intersection and in that city and on that day we find in ourselves.”

Abstract structural photography affords conceptual flexibility and playful re-imagining of what urban structures might represent, both in a real physicial sense and a personal experimental one, drawing us closer to the cities we explore by assigning these structures a purpose and meaning that reflects us, our stories, and our histories.

Striking Dallas architecture has its own set of twin buildings. They are not on par with the famous – or infamous – twins in New York City, or the Marina City buildings in Chicago, but they hold a central position in the urban spectrum of Dallas’ architectural accomplishments. The distance between the two buildings provides space for light and shadows as quality additions to photographic composition and ideas, strikingly combined with the busy 1950’s facades of both of these buildings.

As the tallest building in Fort Worth, Texas, this simple Brutalist architectural design is a unique addition to the vibrant and growing downtown landscape, with a strong, repetitive pattern of windows being interrupted by powerful vertical lines. It is the first and the last building you see when driving past this charming Texas town. It also serves as a prominent symbol of both economic and urban activity in the surrounding downtown area.