Shooting Space

I keep telling myself that one of the things that interests me as a photographer is space, I want to shoot space. How do you shoot space? No, you can’t shoot space itself, you can only shoot objects in space. But I’m interested in images where the visible objects somehow strongly imply the existence of the space in which they exist, sometimes by all-but denying that space. This shot is a case in point:

The image has at least six more or less distinct planes, starting from the front:

1) The bush at the lower right is within, say, 50 yards of where I’m standing, which is on the lower part of the Jersey Palisades in an area of Jersey City, NJ, known as the Heights.

2) The apartment building to the left is in Hoboken, NJ, which is, shall we say, “carved out” of the northeast corner of Jersey City.

3) The large building dominating the middle of the image is in Jersey City at the northern end of the Downtown area. It’s two blocks long and used to be a freight terminal for the Erie Lackawanna Railroad. Now it serves various purposes.

4) The building above the right end of the Erie-Lackawanna building is the top of an apartment building on 10th St. in Jersey city.

5) The more distant buildings left of center near the top are also in Jersey City – they don’t look like NYC office buildings.

6) Finally, in the far distance we see the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, which goes across the mouth of New York harbor.

The camera “squeezes out” all the space between those objects and puts the on the same image plane. Nonetheless, various visual clues (which are spelled out in any elementary text on visual perception) tell that these objects are not in the same plane, that they are separated by some noticeable distances. Those distances, they’re the space that I’m shooting.