T&C, LLC
NORTH MIAMI, FLORIDA

Brent Townshend is an artist and inventor from Toronto, Canada. Brent first became seriously involved with photography as an art form while working on a Doctoral degree at Stanford University. With the darkroom competing with the computer laboratory for his time, he started in black & white 35mm photography and then, in a quest for greater fidelity to reality, moved to a field 4x5 camera and then to color large-format work. During this period he pursued two lines of exploration in parallel; one following the California landscape traditions seeded by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston; the other in street photography with an aim for immediacy..After graduation, he followed a career in scientific research working at AT&T Bell Laboratories, teaching at McGill University and Stanford, and then started a sequence of successful high-tech companies. All of these focussed on signal processing -- how to manipulate and process digital data to extract information or improve its visualization. Meanwhile, he continued his photographic explorations. He studied darkroom techniques under Georges Fèvre, who was the personal printer for Cartier-Bresson and printed for Koudelka, Doisneau, and Lartigue. With John Schults of Reuters he learned the realities of photojournalism. He worked on fashion photography with Atelier Chardon Savard in Paris and explored commercial and studio photography with Hélène Vedrenne at the Paris Photographic Institute..Ultimately, it came time to combine his technical background with photography. As an inventor with over 40 patents, his combination of science and an artistic purpose was a natural progression. In 2005, he began working on ultra-wide angle, high dynamic range digital photography. Using sets of high-resolution digital photos to cover a scene both in viewpoint and light intensity, he developed novel processes and software for capturing and displaying images. These photos capture angles and light that are seldom seen even though most are taken in large public spaces. Brent now divides his time between Menlo Park, CA and Montréal, Quebec. We usually see the world as a narrow-angle view of the horizontal plane; our eyes, our entire design are optimized for living in a flat plane five to six feet off the ground. Looking Up provides an all-encompassing, vertical view that questions that anthropocentric basis. As this work evolved, I’m taking that underlying theme in multiple directions. I’ve photographed at many locations capturing some of the variations that create a distinct place. Even when one looks straight up, unable to see whether there are patisseries or souks, églises or mosques, the differences are striking. I’ve followed my architectural curiosity into grand buildings to apply the same vision to ceilings of museums, opera halls, kasbahs, stations, and cathedrals. I’ve transitioned from complex scenes to emphasizing simpler and simpler graphic elements. In terms of process, I’ve come to appreciate 17th cartographic projections as one of several aesthetic choices in projecting a model of the real world onto a flat piece of paper or backlit transparency. When I started this project, I didn’t fully comprehend the diversity of work that it would lead to. Although there is a significant amount of image processing in the creation of these images, I don’t consider them “manipulated.” If one had an imaginary camera that could capture a 300º field of view with enough dynamic range to marry a blinding sun and the deep shadows of alleyways at 100 Megapixel resolution, then these are the images that might be captured. Without such a camera, I’ve resorted to combining multiple photos from the same viewpoint to fuse together different directions and exposures and then applied mathematical projections to create the same result.