The City as Canvas: What Urban Color Tells Us About Ourselves
The Urban Palette series began with a simple question: What color does the city wear when no one is looking? Wandering through Philadelphia with my camera, I wasn’t drawn to grand architecture or bustling street scenes, but to the smallest, most forgettable surfaces from utility boxes, peeling paint on facades to utility objects and commercial roadside signage.
These fragments, when stripped of context and re-framed through abstraction, began to feel more like human residue than urban residue, as they held color – and in that color, I saw fragments of stories.
Rediscovering the Everyday Through Color
Cities are visual noise, with layers of material, movement, and function competing for our attention. But within that chaos, there’s a language of surface and saturation that’s easy to miss. In Urban Palette I: Daylight Hues, I used daylight to expose these subtle tones. And in the second part of this series, Urban Palette II: Nocturnal Hues that is currently under way, artificial light reshaped how those same surfaces behaved, muted by shadow, ignited by sodium vapor, made strange by isolation.
My aim wasn’t to document the city but to rediscover it through the lens of color and to re-imagine mundane, utilitarian spaces as emotional and aesthetic terrain. The color found in these images, whether applied by artists or designers, or machines, emerged organically, through function, decay, repair, and weather.
Influence Without Intention
I didn’t set out to mimic Color Field painting or the ethos of Abstract Expressionism, but the connections became inevitable. Like the Color Field artists of the last century, I became interested in how large areas of color could evoke mood without the need for identifiable form. When I cropped tightly on a painted metal door or focused on a building facade, it wasn’t about where I was, it was about learning how these colors evolved and meant within the space they occupied.
The gestural legacy of Abstract Expressionism shows up in the incidental textures of the city, often made without any artistic intention, but are able to carry the same energy as an intentional studio brushwork. The city, in a way, accidentally collaborates with abstraction.
Color as a Trace of Human Presence
What ties it all together for me is the idea that color is a trace or a mark of life, decision, and entropy. The blues on a torn canvas fence cover didn’t choose to weather into three distinct tones, or rip a hole that presented an object of a different hue and tone beyond it. The warm cast of a neon sign may be designed for visibility, but after dark, it also floods the sidewalk with an unintentional intimacy.
Progress, like paint, fades. What we build, mark, or abandon eventually breaks down. But in that breakdown is beauty, a visual residue of use, purpose, and time. Urban Palette is a quiet meditation on that idea: that even in decline, cities can be expressive. Even in silence, they may speak in color.
My hope is that Urban Palette invites viewers to look more closely, not just at my photographs, but at the spaces they move through every day. To see the city not just as infrastructure, but as a living canvas, painted slowly by human activity, material decay, and light. There is poetry in the overlooked. And there is meaning in the mundane.
Sometimes we just have to shift our gaze to see it.