Hamilton Health Sciences (February 28, 2011)

It was definitely a good night for photos last Monday. While I was walking to the bus stop by McMaster Health Sciences, I decided to take some pictures of the hospital. As I've mentioned before in this blog, I love the extremes created by night-time lighting and the unfamiliarity they imbue.



This green was a really eerie colour. "The X-Files" is one of my favourite TV shows, and this picture reminds me of something from one of those government test sites where alien foetuses are suspended in rows of dimly-lit glass tanks.



Something ghostly about this. It's probably an elevator shaft and/or a stairwell, but the effect is again altered by the pale fuzzed glow from what looks like bright florescent light, pushing up against the glass. It reminds me of driving though Hamilton's east end late at night, seeing the industrial areas lit up bright and somehow completely different, mysterious and enthralling, nothing like the grey jumble revealed in daylight.



I thought this one (above) looked like a spine--a very cybernetic, exoskeletal spine.



The hospital towering like some industrial monstrosity from a Terry Gilliam movie--slabs of concrete that have that weathered staining around the edges, dim yellow light in the windows and the brightness above. I think it's the visibility of what appear to be structural bits of metal, that makes those elevator shafts seem so nakedly mechanical.



I really wanted to show the way that hanging stringy stuff, whatever it was, was lit up like a cobweb by the blue-green light next to it; and I wanted the tree shadow in there as well. The darkness with this combination of different kinds of artificial light, inside and outside, and the glass walls--those things are all adding to the effect. The orange glow in the foreground is partly cast by the lamp near the road where I'm standing.



I liked how it was hard to see anything on the wall around those windows. And you can't see anything inside, either; just this suggestion of activity signalled by the different kinds of light in each room and by the positions of the window shades.



Again with the eerie green light. Strange for that to be coming from a hospital--I suppose that's what I find a bit creepy about it. The fact that the place looks like a big industrial compound, and that I have a bad impression of hospitals being factories where doctors treat patients like objects to be processed.