[Leica] 2017 Sony WPA

[Douglas Barry]

Dongni from China wins 1st Place in the Professional, Architecture 
section of the 2017 Sony World Photography Awards

I'd never heard of Dongni before and went to 
https://www.worldphoto.org/sony-world-photography-awards/winners-galleries/2017/professional/shortlisted/architecture/1st-place 
having seen a peculiar image of his on the BBC website. The Sony WPA 
gives us this rather gnomic pronunciation...

space&city Rules ordering a regular intensive repetition sum up the 
feeling of the modern city. A variety of urban form and minimalist 
architecture breaks the old structure, splitting it into triangles, 
squares and diamond shapes, refracting a new living style on extant 
spatial structures. Demonstrating a free use of the language of visual 
forms, it appears like a game, similar to Goldbach's conjecture; the 
destruction of the ossified template of the city, a visual exploration 
of breaking the rules. In a spatial context, when we ignore the 
aesthetics of the city, ignore the rules and celebrate the 
deconstruction and reconstruction of the urban space, the space itself 
gives us more control and adds more joy to the city.

Yes, indeed. Then, I looked at the images and realised the man - if 
Dongni is a man - is very Escheresque. Is it photography? Well. the Sony 
judges seem to think so.

Douglas