Briefly: A Perspective Study

After the crushing length of the last post, I wanted to break up the rhythm of this blog a bit and do something shorter. Our insanely-bearded professor, Alec Longstreth, recently gave us the best perspective lecture I have ever seen. He super-imposed perspective lines over normal photos, and by the end it was so obvious that the exercise had been become mundane! For homework, we had to take one of our own photos that clearly shows 1, 2, or 3-point perspective, light-box/trace the perspective lines, and then do an illustration off of it. So here’s the photo I used:

It’s a picture I shot in Berlin, at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. I didn’t write about it at the time, but it was an intensely powerful place to be. As you walk into it and the stone rectangles surround you, it really is disconcerting. Anyway, here it is with some perspective lines on top of it:

The yellow line is the “horizon line;” which is really obvious in this photo because the rectangles become flat and straight on. The other colors are the three planes of perspective. You can see on the right that the red line tapers in a little, and isn’t just straight up and down like it would be in 2-point. So I “light-boxed” (with a piece of plexi-glass on my lap and a desk lamp on the ground pointing up) these perspective lines onto a piece of bristol and drew this:

Please resist the urge but enlarge if you must, it looks much better smaller. I might get around to coloring it at some point — I kinda like it.