When given the topic of ‘home’ for my final project, I began to contemplate where the destination of home would be for me, for example what kind of landscape would represent a homely and familiar environment for me. With this in mind I began to look into Topographic photographers such as Joe Deal and Frank Gohlke.

Frank Gohlke is an American Landscape Photographer who focuses mainly on sparse and minimal landscapes both man-made (such as empty car parks and highway lanes) and natural (such as charred forest floors and curves within the landscape). He often photographs the same locations at different periods of time, noting how the areas change within these periods in the wake of some sort of event or disaster. For example, a devastating tornado struck Gohlke’s home city of Wichita Falls in Texas in 1979, which damaged much of city’s buildings and left many homeless. Gohlke photographed the devastation and then returned to the same area a year later to see how the wreckage had been cleaned up, and how people within his home town had worked hard to create their own safe environment again.

For example, houses had been rebuilt and foliage had grown over the short period of time remarkably well, returning the city to the homely and inviting place that Gohlke remembered from his upbringing.

Joe Deal is an American photographer and topographer who mostly focused on how humanity changes natural landscapes. Much like Gohlke, most of his images are in black and white and represent a cynical view on the way landscape is changing in regards to humanity’s effect on it. One of Deal’s series of images focused on the coastlines of San Andreas, and how buildings and holiday resorts had tarnished the natural phenomena of land meeting the sea.

The way the two make their images very flat and industrial just by the spacial awareness and formatting of the buildings within them. It’s something that I wanted to try within my own images. That’s why over Easter, whilst visiting Ashford (my old hometown) I tried to create a topography photo similar to these. Within the town center,  I went to the highest point I could reach (the top floor of a car park) and began to take photos of the town center, eventually deciding to focus on the large block of flats among the town houses.

I tried to get the horizon straight in the photo, as I believe it matches the artists’ photos in creating a clinical feel whilst emphasising the difference in size between the block of flats and town houses. I then edited the image in photoshop by cropping it into a wider image and making the image monochrome to match Deal’s and Gohlke’s. As Ashford is where home meant for me for the last 10 years I feel the photo represents both a personal connection to me as well as showcasing a general image of the two different types of household – the block of flats and the town houses.