Boston's skyline has long served as both canvas and character, but two photographers now pull the city in opposite directions without leaving its streets. Tilted / Straight, opening September 10th at Panopticon Gallery, pairs Peter Vanderwarker's unwavering documentation of the John Hancock Tower with Fern L. Nesson's disorienting abstractions of Boston's architecture.
Vanderwarker's relationship with the Hancock Tower dates to 1975, when the glass monolith still wore plywood scaffolding and faced public skepticism. His unretouched photographs, shot from helicopters and distant vantage points like MIT, capture the building's geometry as it reflects and distorts the surrounding city. Some of these perspectives have since vanished as Boston's skyline filled in, making his archive a record of both architectural permanence and urban flux. The tower, designed by Harry Cobb, eventually earned the American Institute of Architects' Twenty-Five Year Award, vindicating the bold modernist vision Vanderwarker documented from its earliest days.
Nesson approaches the same city through fragmentation and motion. A Harvard Law graduate turned fine art photographer with an MFA from Maine Media College, she isolates architectural elements until they lose their context and become pure form. Her work, which has shown from Arles to Budapest, treats Boston not as a place to locate but as energy to channel. Tilting, cropping, and recontextualizing familiar structures, she produces images that resist immediate identification while conveying the city's underlying rhythm.
The exhibition's title captures the tension: Vanderwarker's straight shots anchor the viewer in place, while Nesson's tilted frames unsettle that certainty. Together, they demonstrate how a single city can yield radically different visual truths depending on the angle of approach. Both artists work from reality without construction, yet their photographs arrive at opposite ends of the perceptual spectrum—one preserving Boston as it is, the other revealing what it might become when seen anew.
Image: © Fern L. Nesson
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