The City Daily Photo theme for the month of September is “Perspective”. Click here to view thumbnails for all participants

Cornwallis Wharf

In perspective drawing, parallel lines (which are not parallel to the image plane) meet in a point (called the vanishing point of these lines – so who said “parallel lines do not meet”?), and all such points form the “line at infinity” (the horizon). This is a picture of fishermen at Cornwallis wharf, meeting (almost) at a point at infinity. (Distant mist helped in providing a clean horizon, hiding the hills on the other side of the Manukau harbour.)

With our cameras it is easy to create 2-dimensional likenesses of 3-dimensional scenes. But spare a thought for the Renaissance pioneers of geometry, e.g. Alberti, Brunelleschi, Dürer, Leonardo… The desire for realistic representations of the physical world led these painters to geometric investigations of the underlying principles, which in turn inspired great mathematics (projective geometry in particular).

"Allegory of Geometry" (Laurent de la Hire, 1649)