Pop Art Minneapolis

Pop Art Minneapolis is a series of photos of my home city that use highly-saturated color to emphasize its beautiful characteristics. It all started with this photo:

This was definitely a level-up photo for me back in 2008. This was my first day out with an ultrawide lens, at the time the Tokina 11-16mm on my 20D. You can kind of see why I fell in love with that focal length immediately. 11mm on Canon's crop cameras is equivalent to the 17mm I shoot a lot with today on full-frame. It's also an HDR, which some of these are and some of them aren't.

In 2009 I took this companion photo just across the river, and a series was born. The colors of these two went so well together that I decided to focus on color as I worked around Minneapolis.

I may have occasionally gone a tiny bit overboard, but most of these are more in the realm of hyper-realism than surrealism. And those moorings are so yellow I really couldn't resist.

The river, of course, figures strongly in the series as it does in the city. I'm not sure if I like working with water so much because I'm from Minneapolis, or if I like working with Minneapolis so much because there's plenty of water.

Which is not to say they're all water, as there are photos in the series from all over the city.

You can see that reverse-shift effect again on the library photo above right. That overhang is pretty ridiculous even without being emphasized, though.

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Mill Ruins Park, on the downtown riverfront, has been a key location for a lot of these. When I was a teenager this was kind of a wiped-out industrial area, but since then it has turned into a hot spot for museums, theaters, restaurants, and apartments, with this great new park on the waterfront.


The old railroad bridge that's its centerpiece is a pedestrian and bicycle bridge now, and certainly one of our most notable landmarks.


And of course I couldn't do without at least one shot of our best-known landmark, the sculpture Spoonbridge and Cherry by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.


The strong color work is mostly a summer thing, and a lot of its point is to remind people that summer exists during the seven months of the year that it can be dark and dismal here. But night work can bring out the colors in winter, too, so I'll leave you with a couple of winter photos.