The Eiffel Tower, Gustave Eiffel's 1889 masterpiece, built for the World's Fair of that year. This contact sheet style image is one whole roll of film, 16 separate shots, taken with the Pentax 645 camera. This Grid System collection of work was inspired by the cubism of Picasso and Braque, hence I think the Eiffel Tower is a perfect subject, it is also possibly the World's most famous urban landmark and landmarks have a big psychological part to play in the life of a city.

Regarding cubism; in the early 1900's Picasso and Braque were very close and shared many ideas. One thing they had in common was a love of the new entertainment, cinema. They were intrigued by the possibility of recording an object from different perspectives, something the movie camera does with ease. Through Picasso and Braque's efforts to create the same concept on two dimensional canvas, cubism was born.

I use the style of the contact sheet to contain my own cubist efforts. To try to capture a compelling image of the famous tower, I have changed lenses as I look further up the structure, wide angle for the bottom row of photographs, standard lens in the next, telephoto for the top two rows. Strictly speaking much is wrong here in technical and graphic terms, but over time I have come to love this work, just as the Parisians eventually came to love Eiffel's tower.