Jonathan Castellino’s photos make familiar Toronto landscapes weird again
Jonathan Castellino’s photos make familiar Toronto landscapes weird again
Jonathan Castellino’s photo series, Interference Patterns, is named after a natural phenomenon that happens when two waves of similar frequency overlap, creating a new oscillation. Over the past two years, Castellino, best known for his architectural photo blog, Sacramental Perception, has been creating intricate images by layering different photos on top of one another and then combining the resulting jumble into a single frame. The finished photographs are jarringly complex, with familiar Toronto landmarks (the CN Tower, the greenery of the Don Valley ravine) getting lost in surreal new surroundings. We spoke with Castellino about his work. Click through the image gallery to read what he said.
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- <strong>un.veil</strong><br /> “This is from the inside of the Hearn Generating Station. There are tarps left from when <em>Robocop</em> was filmed here in 2012, and they’ve started to get all tattered and shredded. They were kind of blowing in the wind.”
- (Image: Jonathan Castellino)
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- <strong>time’s.ballrom</strong><br /> "This is the old Sutton Place, a mid-century-modern hotel that's now being gutted and turned into a luxury condo tower. I had been meaning to shoot it for a while, because I wanted to photograph the old ballroom and its beautiful windows. When I finally went, they had already demolished most of what I wanted to shoot, except for the one wall that still had those windows."
- (Image: Jonathan Castellino)
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- <strong>the.terrarium</strong><br /> “This one is the Hearn Generating Station intersected with my favourite abandoned thing in Toronto, an old mid-century-modern fountain near Davisville Station. It’s completely overgrown now, but it has beautiful green areas and big abstract shapes. When the two shots are combined, it looks like there’s a forest growing in Hearn, which is what would happen if they stopped filming movies in there.”
- (Image: Jonathan Castellino)
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- <strong>return.of.the.past</strong><br /> “This is the St. Michael’s Cemetery up at St. Clair and Yonge, which is full of obelisks and taller grave structures. It's a site that means a lot to me because I’ve visited it so many times over the years. It's an abandoned graveyard surrounded by busy, modern buildings.”
- (Image: Jonathan Castellino)
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- <strong>the.pause.before.speech</strong><br /> “When you’re driving up north from Toronto towards Bruce Peninsula, you see this house that’s been falling in on itself for about 25 years. A lot of people take photos of it. It’s like we’re all watching this house sink into the ground. Here, it’s layered with the site of the first abandoned place I ever visited: a manor about a 15-minute walk from my childhood house in North York.”
- (Image: Jonathan Castellino)
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- <strong>in.density</strong><br /> “This is a combination of two different photographs from opposite ends of downtown Toronto. One is shot from a condo around Wellesley and Yonge and the other is from the L Tower on the Esplanade. It ended up looking like one of those renderings that artists do when they’re going to demolish a bunch of shit and put up a new condo, where everything is perfect.”
- (Image: Jonathan Castellino)
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- <strong>every.thing,that.rises</strong><br /> “I shot this from one of the oldest skyscrapers in the city, and it’s an attempt to play with <a href="http://www.torontolife.com/informer/toronto-culture/2015/08/18/a-new-altitude-photographer-ronnie-yip-shoots-the-city-from-dizzying-dazzling-heights/" target="_blank">rooftopping culture</a>. Everyone does those wide-angle shots with their feet dangling, and that’s fun, but I wanted to know what it's really like to be illegally on the roof of a building right in the middle of the downtown core. When I went, the wind was crazy and it started to rain. The noise up there was beautiful. With all the ground-level traffic, it sounded almost like the ocean.”
- (Image: Jonathan Castellino)
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- <strong>the.dreamer</strong><br /> “This is a shot from around St. Clair looking down on Yonge Street, overlaid with a similar shot overlooking the Don Valley. Whenever I’m up on a tall building, I’m reminded that we have so much greenery in Toronto.”
- (Image: Jonathan Castellino)
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- <strong>a.drama.in.time</strong><br /> “The name for this composition is based on a quote by the Scottish biologist and urban planner Patrick Geddes. He said, ‘Cities are not a place in space, but rather a drama in time.’ My obsession with abandoned buildings and construction sites is that this is a natural cycle of cities. Everything you build is going to become abandoned one day.”
- (Image: Jonathan Castellino)
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- <strong>convergence</strong><br /> “I shot a friend of mine, who was relatively new to Canada, looking out at Grange Park from the AGO. The other image is a really dense photograph right up Bay Street with all this construction going on. I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting if I had this person looking out over a simple thing, overlaid with this very complex scene?”
- (Image: Jonathan Castellino)
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- <strong>civitatem.machina</strong><br /> “This is the first composition I did for this series. I was super bored with whatever still image I was editing and just opened up a file and threw on all three of these shots. Two were film and one was digital—I didn’t know what it was going to look like. It ended up being so crazy and beautiful. The photos are of three post-industrial neighbourhoods in Toronto.”
- (Image: Jonathan Castellino)
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- <strong>breaking.the.fourth.wall</strong><br /> “This image captures the idea that our city is always beautiful when you shoot it from a distance, because you don’t see the details that might turn you off. Toronto is bound by a decaying decaying structure that you don’t necessarily see unless you look hard enough.”
- (Image: Jonathan Castellino)
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![](http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https://torontolife.com/culture/jason-castellinos-photos-make-familiar-toronto-landscapes-weird-again/&title=Jonathan Castellino’s photos make familiar Toronto landscapes weird again&picture=https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/interference-patterns-jonathan-castellino-intro.jpg&description=[caption id="attachment_323422" align="alignnone" width="656"] (Image: Jonathan Castellino)[/caption]
Jonathan Castellino's photo series, Interference Patterns, is named after a natural phenomenon that happens when two waves of similar frequency overlap, creating a new oscillation. Over the past two years, Castellino, best known for his architectural photo blog, Sacramental Perception, has been creating intricate images by layering different photos on top of one another and then combining the resulting jumble into a single frame. The finished photographs are jarringly complex, with familiar Toronto landmarks (the CN Tower, the greenery of the Don Valley ravine) getting lost in surreal new surroundings. We spoke with Castellino about his work. Click through the image gallery to read what he said.
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This post’s headline originally misstated Jonathan Castellino’s first name. We’ve corrected the error.
Hah! He took some good natured heat about that this afternoon ;- )
Congrats Jono, his work I love and he is a inspiration and power of example to me.