Amazon Review
The Colours of Light is a beautiful, compact, dense little book that showcases English photographer Richard Pare's stunning takes on the respected, influential Japanese architect Tadao Ando. Pare photographed Ando's work over a 10-year period and, with remarkable consistency, has realised the intricacies of Ando's constructed confrontations between architecture and nature. Pare translates this dialogue with great skill in his photographs and easily manages to convey (convert?) the conversations about space, the absence/presence dialectic, that all buildings declaim. Pare, in his overview essay at the end of the book, says: "Space itself is immovable. It has no movement, though all movement is in space. All space is actually static, and potentially dynamic. We conceive space statically, but we experience it dynamically. The space that is rendered in a photograph is a static space of potential movement". His photographs bear out, but overcome, this tension. Tom Heneghan's introduction wonders if Pare's career as a "photographer of architecture rather than an architectural photographer" have enabled him to so keenly grasp the nature of Ando's work. Whatever the reason this is a remarkable collection. --Mark Thwaite