TITLE: The Lodge

There are so few female black and white architectural photographers that a Google search begs the question, do you mean men? While I’m inspired by the architectural angles of Danica O. Kus and impactful black and whites of Julia Anna Gospodarou, I’m strongly led by my own instinct tenants of rich tonality, vivid texture, and creative perspective in monochromatic architectural abstracts.

The Lodge is inspired by three facets of the past—

The Lodge series is from a 1925-26 studio apartment size Arkansas Ozark rock ruin. In The Lodge series, I intended taking the studio apartment size space as far as I could go in viewpoint and meaning in architecture separated from us by a century's worth of time, use, and disuse.

I recently realized my attention to fine detail and varietal shades in black and white images began in teenage sketching. Using #2 pencil, erasure, touch, and edge I sharpened my monochromatic ability “seeing” color in shades of grey. Drawing from the color image of a full-sailed schooner ship at sea calls for special focus to the nuances of depth, texture, contrast, shadow, and light and how one pencil may be a tool to bring it about. I bring that same focus to bear on every pixel of each of my monochromatic photographs.

My freedom to play was stifled in childhood abuse. Through these works I play. The lines of architecture may seem as unforgiving as the bars of a prison on mind, body, and soul. In finding a different perspective or light to shed on architecture, I reveal whatever the circumstance the human spirit, by the grace of God, arises in inspiration, creativity, and life.

AUTHOR: Y. Hope Osborn (United States)

Y. Hope Osborn is an author, photographer, digital artist, and editor residing in Little Rock, Arkansas, USA. Her published writing includes ecological experiences that educate and entertain and personal traumas that encourage survivors and expose victimization. She relies on God’s strength to photographically document space and time of natural color environment; historic often dilapidated black and white studies of built; and more recently, where they intersect. Her absolute art is the fusion of photographs and texts of history and her story, weaving art with how she/we think, feel, believe, connect, and care.

Hope has an MA in Professional and Technical Writing and is published as author and artist with Woods Reader, Plants and Poetry Journal, Whitefish Review, University of Arkansas at Little Rock Writers’ Network, Awakenings, The Sunlight Press, and online Encyclopedia of Arkansas. Her works are exhibited and awarded, including Monovisions Awards, Neutral Density, Julia Margaret Cameron Photography Award, International Photography Awards, Architecture Masterprize, See|Me, internationally, online, and off in Portland, Oregon; New York City; Santa Paula, California, Arkansas—USA and Barcelona, Spain. She won Not Real Art Artist Award and $10,000 Mid-America Arts Alliance Catalyze grants.

Hope believes being a great author and artist is to be entrusted to express reality and imagination that captivates, inspires, or informs while enriching lives.