Spiral Staircase Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art Photography
An Eye-Shaped View Through the Museum’s Main Stairwell
Standing beneath this staircase inside Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, I felt as though I were looking up through a sculpture rather than a functional part of a building. From the ground floor, the stairwell curves upward in layers until the opening at the top forms an unmistakable eye-like shape.
That was the photograph.
I aimed directly upward and let the geometry fill the frame. Railings repeat around each level, sweeping from one side to the other, while the darker stair treads create a second rhythm underneath them. Everything eventually converges around the bright opening at the centre. Even the two ceiling lights become part of the composition, small circular interruptions inside all those long architectural lines.
What I especially like is how quickly the staircase stops reading as a staircase. The practical purpose of the structure begins to disappear and the photograph moves toward abstraction. It can look like an eye, a lens or a series of concentric shapes, depending on where I let my attention settle.
Black and white strengthens that transformation. Without colour, the image becomes almost entirely about line, tone, symmetry and repetition.
I often look for architecture that changes when photographed from an unexpected position. This staircase did exactly that. From below, an ordinary route between floors became something completely different—a carefully ordered piece of geometry hiding inside the museum itself.
© Dan Kosmayer, 2024
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About My Fine Art Photography
Every photograph in my collection comes from my own travels, explorations, and years behind the camera.
I create my work as photographic art rather than mass-produced decoration. From street portraits and abandoned places to landscapes, architecture, and the unusual subjects I discover along the way, each image begins with something that made me stop and look.
My photographs are available in multiple sizes so the same image can work in anything from an intimate wall space to a large statement installation.
