WASHINGTON, DC.- The National Building Museum presents an unprecedented series of photographs by Colin Winterbottom documenting the impact of the August 23, 2011 earthquake on two of the nation’s most recognizable architectural icons—the Washington Monument and the Washington National Cathedral—and the subsequent restoration process. The exhibition, entitled Scaling Washington: Photographs by Colin Winterbottom, features approximately 100 large-format color, black and white, and sepia-toned images including captivating panoramas and stunning close-up views of the earthquake-driven repairs. Scaling Washington marks Winterbottom’s debut museum exhibition and will remain on view through January 3, 2016.
After the August 2011 earthquake, which damaged a number of the capital city’s unreinforced masonry structures, Winterbottom realized he might be able to create one-of-a-kind imagery. Granted unparalleled access to both the Monument and Cathedral, he studied the landmarks from rare and intimate vantages, building a complex portrait of the structures and offering a singular view of their beauty, strength, and fragility.
The exhibition marries Winterbottom’s inspired, atmospheric imagery with finely textured documentary photographs of the restoration process. The photographs create an opportunity to explore technical details about the damage, as well as the repair methods chosen to help heal these two architectural pillars. Somewhat unexpectedly, Witterbottom’s images transform scaffolding from an industrial eyesore into a geometrically complex set of rhythms that accentuate the architecture.
Winterbottom says that he “tries to create images that have a kind of drama and soulful feeling; photographs that show not just what the place looks like, but how it feels to be there.” With these particular photographs of the Monument and Cathedral, Winterbottom explains that “overall, I didn’t want the series to simply say ‘oh, look how tragic this is.’ Instead, I worked to capture these bruised-beauties as a grand place with enduring dynamism and drama everywhere you look.”
“I pass these landmarks every day, and they seem so familiar that we somehow think we know them,” said curator Chrysanthe Broikos. “To the contrary, Colin’s stunning images open completely new perspectives—I was awestruck by their power to make me admire these architectural icons anew.”
The photographs featured here complement the Museum’s on-going exhibition, Designing for Disaster, which introduces new ideas about mitigation in the face of natural disasters. The exhibition includes fallen finial fragments from the pinnacle of a flying buttress at the Cathedral resulting from the 2011 earthquake. A selection of Winterbottom’s photographs is currently displayed in the Great Hall of the Museum, both as a preview of the exhibition and as an artistic contrast to the engineering techniques and innovations described in Designing for Disaster.
After studying economics, philosophy, and social policy and working several years in policy research, Colin Winterbottom made a substantial change in life direction: to train himself in photography. With a heightened sensitivity to place—and especially to the emotional undertones of man's constructed environments—Winterbottom quickly found a style of composition that often draws dynamic tension between elements in the frame. He chose grainy black and white films to emphasize texture and the timeless, emotive tones he sought and quickly found a popular following for his work. In an era where Washington photography was dominated by photographs of tulips at the White House, Winterbottom offered a more complex sense of the city’s celebrated landmarks, its neighborhoods, and lesser-known sites. In the two decades since his turn to photography, modest shows and press accounts grew to fellowship grants, sales, and publication.
With a keen interest in preservation work at historic sites, Winterbottom recognized the power of scaffolding to get him up close to the fine textures and details of ornamental architecture. With opportunities to make photographs from scaffolding at the Washington Monument, US Capitol, US Supreme Court, Lincoln Memorial, and National Archives, he developed his sense of the dynamics of architectural space and an ability to work safely in complex and hazardous work sites, perfectly positioning him for opportunities that came following the D.C. earthquakes in August 2011. As sole photographer for restoration efforts at the Washington Monument and National Cathedral, Winterbottom has sought to blend his artistic expressions with the responsibility to document work processes, and to make photographs that share his unusual access to remarkable, fleeting vantage points with the many others who admire remarkable architecture. The resulting body of images represents a skilled balance of fine art, technical, and documentary photographs.
