25 Richard Duffy-Howard – Engines and Insects

Hull’s River Bridges: Engines and Insects – Richard Duffy-Howard

Engines and Insects started life with the hydraulics in the spine of Scale Bridge in 2017. The idea is not new. The premise follows the famous 20th century fashion photographer Horst P Horst. Away from the high glamour and sensual sophistication of taking photographs for Vogue, Horst’s personal project was called Patterns in Nature.

Patterns in Nature was, in turn, inspired by photographs of plants taken by Karl Blossfeldt in the 19th Century, who built his own lenses and camera specifically for the purpose. Horst likened Karl Blossfeldt’s images to ‘art forms like wrought iron and Gothic architecture’.

In his own time, Horst took photographs of plants: sempervivums, saxifrages and shells, printing the same image many times and then tessellating the prints, creating a single image, in order to take them out of context and examine them with such close attention that they became unfamiliar and revelatory, turning them from the natural to take on more architectural forms.

The idea behind Engines and Insects is to turn that thought on its head, taking the architectural, wrought iron and gothic-like engineering images and reproducing them until they take on a natural quality – perhaps like Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, women dancing, a minotaur, lips, the scales of a snake, insect-like or a Persian rug…

These images are not generated by AI nor an app. Sometimes it takes only two photographs to create the desired image and sometimes it can take 32. However each image is chosen, manipulated and stitched together digitally, and the process remains true to Horst’s original invention. (You can see the originals in a gallery at the foot of the post)

As Engines and Insects began inside Scale Lane Bridge it continued along the river taking photographs from the deck of the motor barge Syntan as we needed to measure the distance between bridges in minutes and knots for the Open Bridges event in 2017.