Have you ever had a real good look at Tisdale's water tower?

Tisdale - Pictures by: Gerald Crawford Text by: Timothy Shire

Last week Gerald shared two pictures with us from his trip to BC. This week we get a photographer's look at the Tisdale water tower. The geometric symmetry of the structures humans create tells us a good deal about the people who make them and indeed the photographer can play with the structure and the way the light reveals the object and in this case the sky as its setting. A great nineteenth century German psychologist Jung (pronounced Young) suggested that there were common visual and conceptual elements that all people share which he referred to as part of our "collective consciousness". One of these commonly shared symbols is the circle, he referred to it as a mandela, for him and his followers the circle binds reality together in a continuum Similarly we find that oriental philosophy seeks a balance of things in which that much sought after harmony comes from the circular nature of completeness as found in the symbol "yin and yang". Perhaps this structure with its series of circles and cylinders is an expression of structural harmony, a composition of a single round structure with a curved base held in place with five vertical cylindrical objects and braced using the power of three in triangular tension. The repeating hoops around the ladder, installed for safety but aesthetically repetition of the circular theme.