At this point of the project I wanted to focus my intentions solely on the Control Tower. This structure is a favourite of mine and in NI there are typically 2 types, these types also feature as a skeleton for modified types used for the modern airfield. I enjoy the shapes and textures that can be found amongst these buildings, obviously there are structural similarities but also looking closely individually they hold their own uniqueness for their current state within the landscape.
There are books and websites dedicated to just this structure as they can be found all over the world (see below), so I am easily able to research the type and use for each one, thus making sure I am correct when presenting my work.
With this in mind I started thinking how I could photograph these structures and present them with a more creative perspective. My intention for these shoots was to capture all available control towers in NI and then create my own structure, combining history into a new aesthetic structure. I started researching Photo Collages/Photo montages for inspiration with the next shoot (However I did not put this into my CRJ as you will see it was unsuccessful). I visited 2 sites that had a similar control towers Greencastle and Cluntoe to experiment with this idea, I kept it simple, a straight on viewpoint and within each frame not capturing more than 1/3 of the control tower. Captured during the day on a digital camera, once I had enough images, I started the edit. My first thoughts were maybe I could merge together old photographs as well as present day but with lack of archive images this was not possible, so I just focused on images from the 2 areas.
Unfortunately, as soon as I started editing, I realised this was not going to work. I didn’t spend a lot of time putting them together as I could see straight away this was not going to work. As you can see I tried merging them in vertical strips and then square format but both would not work (even if more time was spent editing them). The other problem would occur when introducing a different type of control tower and creating the same view point. I recced another area Limavady and because of the foliage it was impossible to create the same angle. I thought I would document this shoot in my CRJ because it did accumulate quite a few hours travelling to 3 sites and I think it is better to have tried something then wondering if it would have worked.
Images by Laura Wing
References
http://www.controltowers.co.uk
http://www.controltowers.co.uk/Books/All_Along_the_Control_Tower_book_review.htm
Critical Research Journal 
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