March 5, 2026
John Rock
Architectural Compositions
California Heritage Museum
February 8 - April 19, 2026
John Rock
Although he studied and now practices architecture, John Rock is also an accomplished photographer. He frames the built environment with an architect's eye to create elegant and complex images that beautifully balance color and form. Drawing from techniques used in commercial architectural photography, as well as from the New Topographics photographers (unromanticised views of human impacted industrial landscapes), Rock has created a body of color photographs that transform the urban landscape into geometric compositions filled with contrasting textures and patterns.
On view are images shot during the last twenty years in the United States and abroad with a range of digital cameras, as well as two short videos. Hung as diptychs, he juxtaposes photographs from the same or different locations, while focusing on visual relationships. In a statement accompanying the exhibition Rock notes, "The deterioration of our built world and its social implications are clearly on display, as is new construction, which can exhibit visual disorder as well." The paired images explore dichotomies between order and chaos, construction and destruction. Photography flattens space and Rock takes advantage of this to transform different aspects of the city into geometric abstractions.
Barcelona, Spain (2008) is a saturated photograph of a dilapidated building facade filled with graffiti. The windows are boarded up with orange coverings that beautifully contrast the bright blue window frames and wall. Here, Rock captures the nuances of unauthorized tags, drawings, and other urban scrawl, pairing with a photograph of another abandoned building that has been covered with tarps, some clear plastic, others a dark orange-pink. Rock captures an elderly gray-haired woman wearing a bright red sweater and carrying plastic bags as she passes by the structure, unaware of how well she complements the scene.
Color dominates two images from Los Angles shot in 2011. In one photograph Rock frames a telephone pole against a mustard-colored stucco facade. To the left of this is a building made of bricks whose hues are more yellow than red. The stucco building in the center of the image has two boarded up windows bisected by the telephone pole. Above is a thin stripe of bright blue sky while below, an expanse of concrete is bordered by green grass. In the second image of the diptych, Rock steps back to focus on a cluttered driveway. The straight-on composition balances a one way sign, a utility pole and turquoise siding, as well as a portion of a white truck. These elements are all positioned in front of a mustard toned house beneath a light blue sky.
Looking at the numerous pairs, it becomes evident that Rock is drawn to what is unusual as well colorful in the urban landscape and has a knack for framing and fragmenting buildings so they appear as geometric shapes. In Detroit, Michigan (2017), an image shot through a multi-paned window toward a wall of windows on another building becomes a composition of layered rectangles. It is paired with another photograph, also from Detroit that focuses on reflections of windows in the windows of a run down building. Two more from Detroit from 2019 center on the facades of brick buildings. In one, the bricks are partially covered by an expanse of gray concrete with irregular dark gray lines that at used to patched cracks in the wall. In the image complement, pieces of rusted steel descend from the top of the photograph, spatially located in front of the wall referencing large-scale minimalist sculptures also compose of rusted metals.
In addition to these compelling photographic diptychs, the exhibition also includes two short videos, Downtown Detroit (2020) and Recurring Visions (2018). Downtown Detroit was filmed in 2012. Rock positioned his camera to look out the window of Detroit's People Mover as it traversed the city. Each time the monorail car stopped, the film shifted to its doors where Rock inserted a still of a historic postcard showing the city as it was in 1920. The film becomes a journey both forward and backwards in time.
Between 1974 and 1978, Rock photographed billboards in Santa Monica and West Los Angeles, returning to roughly the same spot and shooting from the same vantage point to document different advertisements. In the short film Recurring Visions, these changing displays are coupled with a soundtrack culled from AM radio commercials of the time. For those familiar with these Los Angeles intersections today, the images take us back to when cars were low and wide, train tracks criss-crossed the boulevards, and gigantic advertisements for cigarettes and alcohol were common.
While Rock's 'architectural compositions' might take cues from photographs and photographers from the past, they are carefully composed gems that stem from his unique take on the world around him. They are about transformation of the three-dimensional world onto the two-dimensional picture plane. Although he often documents places in disrepair or where the less well off reside, they celebrate the formal beauty of structures through the precise and caring eye of an architect.
Architectural Compositions
California Heritage Museum
February 8 - April 19, 2026
John Rock
Although he studied and now practices architecture, John Rock is also an accomplished photographer. He frames the built environment with an architect's eye to create elegant and complex images that beautifully balance color and form. Drawing from techniques used in commercial architectural photography, as well as from the New Topographics photographers (unromanticised views of human impacted industrial landscapes), Rock has created a body of color photographs that transform the urban landscape into geometric compositions filled with contrasting textures and patterns.
On view are images shot during the last twenty years in the United States and abroad with a range of digital cameras, as well as two short videos. Hung as diptychs, he juxtaposes photographs from the same or different locations, while focusing on visual relationships. In a statement accompanying the exhibition Rock notes, "The deterioration of our built world and its social implications are clearly on display, as is new construction, which can exhibit visual disorder as well." The paired images explore dichotomies between order and chaos, construction and destruction. Photography flattens space and Rock takes advantage of this to transform different aspects of the city into geometric abstractions.
Barcelona, Spain (2008) is a saturated photograph of a dilapidated building facade filled with graffiti. The windows are boarded up with orange coverings that beautifully contrast the bright blue window frames and wall. Here, Rock captures the nuances of unauthorized tags, drawings, and other urban scrawl, pairing with a photograph of another abandoned building that has been covered with tarps, some clear plastic, others a dark orange-pink. Rock captures an elderly gray-haired woman wearing a bright red sweater and carrying plastic bags as she passes by the structure, unaware of how well she complements the scene.
Color dominates two images from Los Angles shot in 2011. In one photograph Rock frames a telephone pole against a mustard-colored stucco facade. To the left of this is a building made of bricks whose hues are more yellow than red. The stucco building in the center of the image has two boarded up windows bisected by the telephone pole. Above is a thin stripe of bright blue sky while below, an expanse of concrete is bordered by green grass. In the second image of the diptych, Rock steps back to focus on a cluttered driveway. The straight-on composition balances a one way sign, a utility pole and turquoise siding, as well as a portion of a white truck. These elements are all positioned in front of a mustard toned house beneath a light blue sky.
Looking at the numerous pairs, it becomes evident that Rock is drawn to what is unusual as well colorful in the urban landscape and has a knack for framing and fragmenting buildings so they appear as geometric shapes. In Detroit, Michigan (2017), an image shot through a multi-paned window toward a wall of windows on another building becomes a composition of layered rectangles. It is paired with another photograph, also from Detroit that focuses on reflections of windows in the windows of a run down building. Two more from Detroit from 2019 center on the facades of brick buildings. In one, the bricks are partially covered by an expanse of gray concrete with irregular dark gray lines that at used to patched cracks in the wall. In the image complement, pieces of rusted steel descend from the top of the photograph, spatially located in front of the wall referencing large-scale minimalist sculptures also compose of rusted metals.
In addition to these compelling photographic diptychs, the exhibition also includes two short videos, Downtown Detroit (2020) and Recurring Visions (2018). Downtown Detroit was filmed in 2012. Rock positioned his camera to look out the window of Detroit's People Mover as it traversed the city. Each time the monorail car stopped, the film shifted to its doors where Rock inserted a still of a historic postcard showing the city as it was in 1920. The film becomes a journey both forward and backwards in time.
Between 1974 and 1978, Rock photographed billboards in Santa Monica and West Los Angeles, returning to roughly the same spot and shooting from the same vantage point to document different advertisements. In the short film Recurring Visions, these changing displays are coupled with a soundtrack culled from AM radio commercials of the time. For those familiar with these Los Angeles intersections today, the images take us back to when cars were low and wide, train tracks criss-crossed the boulevards, and gigantic advertisements for cigarettes and alcohol were common.
While Rock's 'architectural compositions' might take cues from photographs and photographers from the past, they are carefully composed gems that stem from his unique take on the world around him. They are about transformation of the three-dimensional world onto the two-dimensional picture plane. Although he often documents places in disrepair or where the less well off reside, they celebrate the formal beauty of structures through the precise and caring eye of an architect.