WASHINGTON AND THE CAPITOL

MARCH 27, 2026

                                      WASHINGTON AND THE CAPITOL

This week I would like to begin a series of essays discussing the images included in my new book, “Urban Fragments.” It has finally gone to print, with only a few remaining typos, and I am very proud of it’s realization. This new book is more of a traditional photography book than my past efforts, It contains a short introductory essay, but no discussion of individual photographs beyond a title and as close a creation date as I can remember. I will attempt to use these blogposts to tell some of the stories beyond these images.

                                      ORIGINAL SNAPSHOT AFTER CROPPING

This image dates from some time in the early 1980’s. It began as a color image on film, which I converted to black and white after I scanned it and did some post processing. The original snapshot’s dimensions are lost somewhere in time. What remains is my square crop which focusses on the relationship between the Washington Monument and the distant Capitol Dome.

My crop eliminates most of the blue sky above the Monument, and most of the surroundings on each side. In this way almost all of the attention is placed on the low, (almost on the bottom edge), horizon line. The image becomes a juxtaposition of one horizontal line and two archetypal shapes - the triangular monument and the round dome in the distance. These two shapes are so recognizable that they are easily discerned even if they are just fragments of the entire buildings. 

My telephoto lens has foreshortened the distance between the two so that they appear to be right next to each other, instead of the mile that actually separates them on the Capital Mall. This particular foreshortening also completely disguises the actual geography. Only a Washingtonian realizes that somehow Capital Hill has completely disappeared so that the dome at the top of the Capitol Building now appears as if it is on the same ground plane as the base of the monument. Most of the height of the Capitol, it’s hill and the gradual slope down from the Monument to the Congress at the other end of the Mall has been removed in this perspective.

This unreal geometry removes the image from the documentary realm. It is almost as if this view in Washington now more resembles the 1939 Worlds Fair’s  “Trylon and Perisphere” than our national Capital. My conversion to black and white reinforces both the timeless nature of the scene as “sometime in the Twentieth Century” as well as removing the color distractions of the green grass and the red, white, and blue of the flags at the base of the Monument. Black and white forces the viewer’s attention on the geometry and the texture of the stone that makes up the Capital.

                                     FINAL IMAGE