Marslight over Chicago
Terry Baker
printed on Giclée Epson Semi-Gloss
The original image, captured on a Nikon D700 camera in Chicago, displays a dramatic juxtaposition between the Wrigley Building and the Trump Tower. The Wrigley Building (1919-24, architects - Graham, Anderson, Probst and White) was roughly modelled on La Giralda, the sixteenth-century tower of Seville's cathedral, along with a sprinkling of French Renaissance and Moorish overtones. How different from the ultra modernist Trump Tower (2005-9, architect - Adrian Smith of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) a 423 metre monolith of concrete and glass. The image has been generously sharpened in Photoshop to give a sense of heightened reality and colours have been saturated to increase the complementary nature of yellows and blues. The addition of the planet Mars, hovering serenely in a coal-black sky and casting its warm, alien glow onto the fabric of the buildings, completes the unhinged reality of the scene. If we cannot (yet) go to Mars then why should not Mars, perhaps at the behest of a president, come to us?
